Collective Conscious

The Achilles Heel of the Path to Pros­per­ity:

The response to Ryan’s bud­get is really sim­ple. He cuts Medicare and other vital pro­grams in order to finance a huge tax cut for peo­ple who don’t really need it. That’s the point Repub­li­cans don’t want to defend but should be forced to.

The Ryan Plan is “Fun­da­men­tally Immoral”:

The game being played here has lit­tle to do with the bud­get itself. It is an ide­o­log­i­cal debate about the role and oblig­a­tion of gov­ern­ment. First, cut taxes for the wealthy to cre­ate a big hole in the bud­get, have a Great Reces­sion aid the cause by strip­ping gov­ern­ment at all lev­els of tax rev­enue, increas­ing costs of serv­ing peo­ple, and cre­at­ing short-​​run deficit prob­lems (and a war here and there doesn’t hurt the cause either), and finally use the deficit as a club against social insur­ance pro­grams such as Medicare and Social Security.

Ten Angry Men:

What we saw was a House press con­fer­ence held by 10 peo­ple who look remark­ably sim­i­lar to one another: 10 pow­er­ful, con­ser­v­a­tive, white men in dark suits, who make more money in a year than the vast major­ity of the Amer­i­can people.

And these 10 pow­er­ful, con­ser­v­a­tive, white men in dark suits all want the same thing: to approve a bud­get that imposes hard­ship on the elderly, the dis­abled, low-​​income fam­i­lies, and the mid­dle class, while reward­ing the wealthy and cor­po­ra­tions with even more tax breaks.

Ryan’s Cow­ardly Bud­get:

The Cen­ter has just issued a state­ment on House Bud­get Com­mit­tee Chair­man Paul Ryan’s bud­get plan and a brief analy­sis show­ing that the plan would get about two-​​thirds of its more than $4 tril­lion in bud­get cuts over 10 years from pro­grams that serve peo­ple of lim­ited means.

The CBO Scores Paul Ryan:

The fed­eral government’s health care bill would become much more pre­dictable and man­age­able under Mr Ryan’s bud­get. For indi­vid­u­als and states, the oppo­site would be true.

CBO Looks at Ryan­Care:

As the CBO rec­og­nizes, a lot of what Ryan is doing isn’t sav­ing money so much as shift­ing costs. Poor peo­ple and seniors don’t need less health care because Medicare and Med­ic­aid are pro­vid­ing less health care. They just have to pay for more of it on their own.

Seri­ous­ness and Hon­esty are Only Con­di­tion­ally Virtues:

Only some­one look­ing down from the rar­efied air of the NYT op/​ed page– finan­cially secure, in pos­ses­sion of good health insur­ance, dis­con­nected, unaf­fected by the pro­posed pol­icy, and as deep in the bub­ble as one can go– could call it any­thing else than pol­i­tics as usual.