Apparently, Paul Ryan has some folks fooled. His latest attempt to grapple with mathematics (check out my last post to see how accurate his previous attempt was) has produced a budget plan that would cut taxes and spending. It sounds nice...but it isn't.
According to Krugman, Ryan's plan to cut taxes means what it always means when Republicans talk about cutting taxes, rich people wouldn't pay as much. Everyone else, however (95% of us) would pay more. How you can finagle raising taxes on 95% of the population into "tax cuts" is beyond my reasoning skills, just as mathematics is beyond Paul Ryan.
It's true, that Ryan's plan to cut spending would lower the deficit, but all of that would be immediately offset by the loss of revenue from his tax cuts on the wealthy, leaving America with a projected deficit in 2020 that is exactly the same as what it is currently projected to be. In other words, Paul Ryan's plan calls for America to stop spending money, and still somehow not manage to save any money. THAT is impressive.
What many people perhaps forget about when they get scared by the big bad deficit monster, is that Big Brother (as my friends on the right like to call him) gets his money from us via taxes. Big Brother then spends this money on things we may or may not want. Sometimes, Big Brother spends unwisely - war in Iraq, a welfare system that's leakier than a sieve, aid money to Pakistan that ends up buying bombs that kill Marines, and brand new fighter jets that can run circles around those pesky Soviet MiGs. Sometimes, though, Big Brother is smarter with his money - Medicare, Social Security and (smart) education spending. Either way, Big Brother needs our money to operate. We can disagree on what Big Brother spends his money on, but even if your fiercely advocating for those new MiG busting planes, you acknowledge that Big Brother needs some dough.
Which is why Paul Ryan's plan is asinine, because he wants to deprive the government of 4 trillion dollar dollar bills over the next decade. Repeat, 4 trillion monies. That's a lot of monies that Paul Ryan wants Uncle Sam not to have. So tax cuts aren't really going to solve the deficit problem, unless of course you believe in Reaganomics, but intelligent folks stopped believing in Reaganomics when it proved to be a huge failure...while Reagan was president. Maybe Paul Ryan still believes in that, because he's 0 for 2 in the "figuring out how America's deficit works" department.
Let me reiterate my call for an understanding of these issues - the economy and the deficit. They're linked, but separate. We can fix one and watch the other work itself out, or we can focus on the wrong one and make the other worse. Some people may think we can fix the deficit and make the economy strong again, and perhaps so, we'll ask the Irish.
Boo Paul Ryan. Hooray Paul Krugman. And one pat on the back for me because I wrote, one day ahead of Krugman, that Paul Ryan is doofus.
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