Bill Kristol, who had predicted that Mitt Romney would name Paul Ryan as his vice presidential running-mate, expressed some concern Saturday morning that Republicans may have a hard time defending the GOP budget, which disproportionately cuts taxes for the rich.
“It’s the tax cuts for the wealthy, where Republicans have not done a particularly good job of defending it and I think you’ll see Democratic attacks focus on that side of the equation,” he said. The Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore agreed, but noted, “who’s better to defend those policies that Paul is, I mean he knows this stuff better than anyone.” Watch it:
Paul Ryan’s infamous budget — which Romney embraced — replaces “the current tax structure with two brackets — 25 percent and 10 percent — and cut the top rate from 35 percent.” Federal tax collections would fall “by about $4.5 trillion over the next decade” as a result. To avoid increasing the national debt, the budget proposes massive cuts in social programs and “special-interest loopholes and tax shelters that litter the code.”
But 62 percent of the savings would come from programs that benefit the lower- and middle-classes, who would also experience a tax increase. That’s because while Ryan “would extend the Bush tax cuts, which are due to expire at the end of this year, he would not extend President Obama’s tax cuts for those with the lowest incomes, which will expire at the same time.” Households “earning more than $1 million a year, meanwhile, could see a net tax cut of about $300,000 annually.”
Mitt Romney has spent the week characterizing President Obama’s decision to grant waivers to states seeking innovative solutions for meeting the work requirements in welfare reform as gutting the program. In reality, the administration would require participating states “to increase the number of people transitioning from welfare to work by 20 percent” and require states to “demonstrate clear progress” in the first year of the waiver.
Interestingly, Romney’s newly-minted Vice Presidential running-mate, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), adopted a different approach as a congressman during the Bush administration. In 2002, Ryan folded a provision into a House-backed version of President Bush’s welfare reauthorization bill that provided his home state “a significant break in meeting new federal work rules,” lowering the work requirement from 70 percent to just 45 percent. From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (4/3/2002):
Those measures — patterned after a Bush administration plan — require states to have 70% of their welfare recipients working by 2007. That’s compared with an average of about one-third now.
But under the change sought by Ryan, a Janesville Republican, the states with the biggest drop in their welfare caseloads since 1995 would have a lower threshold to meet.
Wisconsin had the third-biggest caseload drop between 1995 and 2001 — 76%. Under Ryan’s change, that would mean the state would need to have 54% of its welfare recipients working by 2007, instead of 70%. Sixteen other states would get relief under the change, but only two states would benefit more than Wisconsin.
Echoing language now employed by the Obama administration, Ryan argued that the provision would “give the state more flexibility in meeting the tough new federal work requirements expected to be enacted this year — including more use of education and training to help move people into better-paying jobs.”
“We need to be able to have the freedom to exercise discrimination on a case-by-case basis,” he said. Democrats approved the measure and “Ryan also got a provision included that is designed to make it easier for states to get broad waivers from federal rules in order to experiment with new programs.”
Ryan has since criticized the Obama administration’s welfare waiver, arguing that the policy would have the effect of “increasing welfare dependency without transitioning people back to work.” “That is not the American idea. That’s a welfare state,” he insisted.
Mitt Romney’s selection of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) as his Vice Presidential running mate suggests that he will advocate strongly for the House Budget Chairman’s proposal if the ticket is elected in November. But there is one big problem: the budget is a big con. It gives massive tax breaks to corporations and the richest Americans, makes drastic cuts in social program, but still raises the deficit.
The document calls for $5 trillion in new tax cuts for the richest Americans and for corporations, on top of extending all of the Bush tax cuts. These include:
– Removing the 15 percent bracket at a cost of more than $1.3 trillion
Ryan argues that he makes up for the lost revenue by “broadening the base” — and closing “special-interest loopholes and tax shelters that litter the code” — though the budget itself “does not name a single existing loophole, deduction, credit, or exemption that it would change in any way.”
As CAP’s Michael Linden has pointed out, “with all the House budget’s tax cuts properly accounted for, revenue would average just 15.3 percent of GDP from 2013 through 2022, not 18.3 percent. The result: deficits would never drop below 4.4 percent of GDP, and would rise to more than 5 percent of GDP by 2022.”
The GOP’s “debt reduction” isn’t just based on fantasy levels of revenue — it’s based on “massive, unrealistic” spending cuts as well. Medicaid would face $1 trillion cuts in the first decade, while education and workforce training programs would get cut in half and transportation funding would be reduced by nearly 25 percent. The plan, which also ignores previous deals and increases defense spending, would also require deep cuts in other vital domestic programs.
Mitt Romney has picked as his running mate 42 year-old Republican Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI), the architect of the GOP budget, which the New York Times has described as “the most extreme budget plan passed by a house of Congress in modern times.” Below are 12 things you should know about Ryan and his policies:
1. Ryan embraces the extreme philosophy of Ayn Rand. Ryan heaped praise on Ayn Rand, a 20th-century libertarian novelist best known for her philosophy that centered on the idea that selfishness is “virtue.” Rand described altruism as “evil,” condemned Christianity for advocating compassion for the poor, viewed the feminist movement as “phony,” and called Arabs “almost totally primitive savages. Though he publiclyrejected “her philosophy” in 2012, Ryan had professed himself a strong devotee. “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” he said at a D.C. gathering honoring the author of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.” “I give out ‘Atlas Shrugged’ as Christmas presents, and I make all my interns read it. Well… I try to make my interns read it.” Learn more about Ryan’s muse:
2. Ryan wants to raises taxes on the middle class, cut them for millionaires. Paul Ryan’s infamous budget — which Romney embraced — replaces “the current tax structure with two brackets — 25 percent and 10 percent — and cut the top rate from 35 percent.” Federal tax collections would fall “by about $4.5 trillion over the next decade” as a result and to avoid increasing the national debt, the budget proposes massive cuts in social programs and “special-interest loopholes and tax shelters that litter the code.” But 62 percent of the savings would come from programs that benefit the lower- and middle-classes, who would also experience a tax increase. That’s because while Ryan “would extend the Bush tax cuts, which are due to expire at the end of this year, he would not extend President Obama’s tax cuts for those with the lowest incomes, which will expire at the same time.” Households “earning more than $1 million a year, meanwhile, could see a net tax cut of about $300,000 annually.”
Audiences have booed Ryan for the unfair distribution:
3. Ryan wants to end Medicare, replace it with a voucher system. Ryan’s latest budget transforms the existing version of Medicare, in which government provides seniors with a guaranteed benefit, into a “premium support” system. All future retirees would receive a government contribution to purchase insurance from an exchange of private plans or traditional fee-for-service Medicare. But since the premium support voucher does not keep up with increasing health care costs, the Congressional Budget Offices estimates that new beneficiaries could pay up to $1,200 more by 2030 and more than $5,900 more by 2050. A recent study also found that had the plan been implemented in 2009, 24 million beneficiares enrolled in the program would have paid higher premiums to maintain their choice of plan and doctors. Ryan would also raise Medicare’s age of eligibility to 67.
4. Ryan thinks Social Security is a “ponzi scheme.” In September of 2011, Ryan agreed with Rick Perry’s characterization of Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme” and since 2005 has advocated for privatizing the retirement benefit and investing it in stocks and bonds. Conservatives claim that this would “outperform the current formula based on wages earned and overall wage appreciation,” but the economic crisis of 2008 should serve as a wake-up call for policymakers who seek to hinge Americans’ retirement on the stock market. In fact, “a person with a private Social Security account similar to what President George W. Bush proposed in 2005″ would have lost much of their retirement savings.
5. Ryan’s budget would result in 4.1 million lost jobs in 2 years. Ryan’s budget calls for massive reductions in government spending. He has proposed cutting discretionary programs by about $120 billion over the next two years and mandatory programs by $284 billion, which, the Economic Policy Institute estimates, would suck demand out of the economy and “reduce employment by 1.3 million jobs in fiscal 2013 and 2.8 million jobs in fiscal 2014, relative to current budget policies.”
6. Ryan wants to eliminate Pell Grants for more more than 1 million students. Ryan’s budget claims both that rising financial aid is driving college tuition costs upward, and that Pell Grants, which help cover tuition costs for low-income Americans, don’t go to the “truly needy.” So he cuts the Pell Grant program by $200 billion, which could “ultimately knock more than one million students off” the program over the next 10 years.
7. Ryan supports $40 billion in subsides for big oil. In 2011, Ryan joined all House Republicans and 13 Democrats in his vote to keep Big Oil tax loopholes as part of the FY 2011 spending bill. His budget would retain a decade’s worth of oil tax breaks worth $40 billion, while cutting “billions of dollars from investments to develop alternative fuels and clean energy technologies that would serve as substitutes for oil.” For instance, it “calls for a $3 billion cut in energy programs in FY 2013 alone” and would spend only $150 million over five years — or 20 percent of what was invested in 2012 — on energy programs.
8. Ryan has ownership stakes in companies that benefit from oil subsidies . Ryan “and his wife, Janna, own stakes in four family companies that lease land in Texas and Oklahoma to the very energy companies that benefit from the tax subsidies in Ryan’s budget plan,” the Daily Beast reported in June of 2011. “Ryan’s father-in-law, Daniel Little, who runs the companies, told Newsweek and The Daily Beast that the family companies are currently leasing the land for mining and drilling to energy giants such as Chesapeake Energy, Devon, and XTO Energy, a recently acquired subsidiary of ExxonMobil.”
9. Ryan claimed Romneycare has led to “rationing and benefit cuts.” “I’m not a fan of [Romney's health care reform] system,” Ryan told C-SPAN in 2010. He argued that government is rationing care in the state and claimed that people are “seeing the system bursting by the seams, they’re seeing premium increases, rationing and benefit cuts.” He called the system “a fatal conceit” and “unsustainable.” Watch it:
10. Ryan believes that Romneycare is “not that dissimilar to Obamacare.” Though Romney has gone to great lengths to distinguish his Massachusetts health care law from Obamacare, Ryan doesn’t see the difference. “It’s not that dissimilar to Obamacare, and you probably know I’m not a big fan of Obamacare,” Ryan said at a breakfast meeting sponsored by the American Spectator in March of 2011. “I just don’t think the mandates work … all the regulation they’ve put on it…I think it’s beginning to death spiral. They’re beginning to have to look at rationing decisions.”
11. Ryan accused generals of lying about their support for Obama’s military budget. In March, Ryan couldn’t believe that Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey supports Obama’s Pentagon budget, which incorporates $487 billion in cuts over 10 years. “We don’t think the generals are giving us their true advice,” Ryan said at a policy summit hosted by the National Journal. “We don’t think the generals believe that their budget is really the right budget.” He later apologized for the implication. Watch it:
12. Ryan co-sponsored a “personhood” amendment, an extreme anti-abortion measure. Ryan joined 62 other Republicans in co-sponsoring the Sanctity of Human Life Act, which declares that a fertilized egg “shall have all the legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood.” This would outlaw abortion, some forms of contraception and invitro fertilization.
Bill Kristol, who had predicted that Mitt Romney would name Paul Ryan as his vice presidential running-mate, expressed some concern Saturday morning that Republicans may have a hard time defending the GOP budget, which disproportionately cuts taxes for the rich. 
Mitt Romney has spent the week characterizing President Obama’s decision to grant waivers to states seeking innovative solutions for meeting the work requirements in welfare reform as 
Mitt Romney’s selection of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) as his Vice Presidential running mate suggests that he will advocate strongly for the House Budget Chairman’s proposal if the ticket is elected in November. But there is one big problem: the budget is a big con. It gives massive tax breaks to corporations and the richest Americans, makes drastic cuts in social program, but still 
Mitt Romney has picked as his running mate 42 year-old Republican Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI), the architect of the GOP budget, which the New York Times has described as “
