House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) unveiled the third version of his budget this morning, and due to the demand of his party’s conservative base, this version supposedly achieves balance within 10 years, at least a decade faster than past versions would have theoretically achieved the same goal.

But just like past versions, this version will fail to actually achieve the balance Ryan claims. That’s because the budget only gets to a balanced level in 2023 because Ryan has assumed revenue and spending levels that his budget can’t actually match. Ryan’s budget provides more than $7 trillion in tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations without proposing specific ways to make up for that lost revenue, meaning his budget — the one he has touted as a plan to rein in Washington’s runaway deficits and debt — will fall short of his goals, as Center for American Progress Tax and Budget Policy Director Michael Linden explains:

Last year the Tax Policy Center estimated that these provisions would generate revenue equaling just 15.8 percent of GDP in 2022. Extrapolating to 2023 suggests that Rep. Ryan is missing about $840 billion of revenue in 2023 alone, and approximately $7 trillion over the entire 10-year period from 2014 through 2023. After accounting for the added interest costs from all of these unpaid-for tax cuts, Ryan’s budget would still be about $1.2 trillion in the red in 2023.

But it isn’t just fantasy revenue levels on which Ryan relies. He also is basing his budget on massive spending cuts that aren’t laid out in specific (and haven’t been in previous versions either) and aren’t realistic, given that they would take spending levels lower than they have ever been before. As Linden notes, Ryan’s budget would drop non-defense discretionary spending to just 2.1 percent of GDP, even though it has never totaled less than 3.2 percent of GDP since records began in 1962.

It’s for this reason that the Congressional Budget Office told Ryan it couldn’t give him a better long-term outlook for his budget — the only reason the nonpartisan office could judge the plan at all was because it applied the revenue and spending assumptions he provided. And because Ryan cuts so much revenue without a plausible way to make up for it, his plan to reduce the debt would likely add trillions of dollars to it instead.

Our guest bloggers are Julia Gordon, Director of Housing Finance and Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and David Sanchez, a Special Assistant for Economic Policy at CAPAF.

At this morning’s Senate hearing on Richard Cordray’s nomination to head the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB), congressional Republicans hammered home their objections to the Bureau: the CFPB and its director are unaccountable to Congress and have too much power to regulate the financial sector.

Lest anyone misunderstand their intentions, 43 Senate Republicans recently sent a letter to President Obama stating that they will filibuster any nominee to direct the CFPB until they can reduce the agency’s independence and power.

Yet these same Republicans who are so concerned about accountability and the perils of independent agencies have been entirely content to leave the future of housing finance in the hands of a fully independent agency not subject to appropriations: the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA). Ed DeMarco, a Bush holdover who was neither nominated by the President nor confirmed by the Senate, is the current Acting Director of the FHFA.

At this morning’s hearing, Sen. Michael Crapo, the leading Republican of the Senate Banking Committee, summed up the Republican objections to the CFPB:

“Unfortunately, the CFPB lacks…transparency regarding and openness regarding its operations, budget, and intended activities….The director…holds unique power to determine the agency’s budget and mission priorities without any public debate or input from Congress.”

The most important Republicans on financial regulation and oversight issues agree. As they’ve said:

House Oversight and Government Committee, under Chairman Darrell Issa: “At a time of prolonged economic strain, American consumers can ill-afford such an unaccountable, unresponsive, and all-powerful financial regulator.”

Rep. Spencer Baucus, the ex-chair of the Housing Financial Services Committee: “The director of the CFPB is given a broad and virtually unlimited mandate to substitute his or her judgment for that of consumers and the free market.”

Yet, this insistence that Congressional oversight is paramount doesn’t apply when it comes to the FHFA, which has almost unlimited authority to regulate housing giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

While Republicans have used their claim that strict congressional oversight is crucial to justify their effort to defang the CFPB, they are all too willing to cheer while DeMarco makes unilateral decisions that have a profound effect on America’s housing market.

For example, ex-Chairman Baucus has praised DeMarco for using his vast powers to make the most politically controversial decision of his term: a prohibition on principal write-downs on mortgages owned mortgages owned by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, even though it would have saved money for taxpayers. Likewise, House Oversight Committee Republicans have lauded DeMarco and urged that he remain an “independent regulator,” and he has only been able to stay in his job because Republicans have refused to confirm a permanent successor.

DeMarco has used his virtually unlimited powers to dramatically reshape housing finance in America — whether by moving forward with plans to markedly change the role Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac play in our economy, creating a new platform for securitizing mortgages, or punishing states for their laws surrounding foreclosures. These decisions will impact nearly all American families, whether they own their home, hope to become homeowners someday, or are simply seeking affordable rental options.

In contrast to the CFPB, which has sought public comment on all its rulemakings and which even invites consumer input on its webpage, FHFA makes most of its decisions far from the public eye, almost never engaging in public rulemaking.

In short, the Republicans love independence — when they like the result. The real opposition to CFPB has nothing to do with agency accountability, but everything to do with ideological objections to consumer protections.

Jack Jenkins is a writer and researcher for the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative at the Center for American Progress.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) unveiled the House GOP’s latest budget proposal this morning, championing it as “an exit ramp from the current mess — and an entry ramp to a better future.” But the proposal, which includes expansive tax breaks for the wealthy and slashes funding to programs such as Medicaid and food stamps, has sparked frustration amongst prominent faith leaders who say its draconian cuts are destructive to the lives of America’s poor.

Hours after Ryan’s announcement, a diverse group of faith leaders condemned the budget as “unacceptable” and “immoral.” “Today we are convinced more than ever that the voices of the people must be heard and that Rep. Ryan’s cuts to vital human-needs programs to benefit the wealthy must be defeated,” wrote Sister Simone Campbell, a Catholic nun and executive director of NETWORK, a Catholic social justice lobby. “We are a nation for the 100 percent, and his budget cuts are both immoral and counter to our values.”

Other faith leaders echoed Campbell in a statement from the Center for American Progress and Faith in Public Life:

Bishop Minerva G. Carcaño, The United Methodist Church, Los Angeles area: The House Republican budget cuts away at vital social services that affect the poor and those who are barely able to meet the basic needs of their families. Our national budget reflects our core moral values and we will not recover economically until we address our unjust approach to budgeting. People living on the economic margins must be treated with care and dignity if we are to ever hope to have a just and effective national budget.

Rabbi Laurie Coskey, Ed.D., executive director of the Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, San Diego, California: Our representatives in the House and Senate are elected, inaugurated, and anointed to the sacred responsibility of serving the common good through public office. As leaders of diverse faith communities, we urge them to protect the “least among us”—the children, the infirm, the poor, and the vulnerable. Members of our congregations depend upon our chosen representatives to hear their cries of suffering and to work collaboratively to pass a Moral Budget. May it reflect the highest values and priorities of family, community, state, and a just society.

Rev. Bruce Reyes-Chow, former moderator of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.): This budget, if pursued and passed, will send a message, in both tone and tactic, that our government is more concerned with protecting those who control wealth and privilege than supporting those upon whom that wealth and privilege has been built. As a person of faith, as a citizen of the United States, and as a human being, this is simply unacceptable and I urge Congress to reject Rep. Ryan’s budget.

Bishop Gene Robinson, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress: Every world religion describes a God who will judge us by the way we treat the most vulnerable among us. The prophets of the Jewish scriptures, and certainly Jesus, would have much to say about the impending cuts to the most vulnerable brought on by the Ryan budget. And it wouldn’t be pretty! People of faith need to stand up to a Congress that would “save” the economy on the backs of the poor, the disabled, and the vulnerable.

This isn’t the first time faith leaders have chastised Ryan and House Republicans for failing to offer a moral budget. Ryan was widely rebuked by religious groups last year after he claimed that his budget proposal was in line with Catholic social teaching, leading Catholic bishops to issue formal letters decrying the proposal and Catholic nuns to organize a multi-state “Nuns on the Bus” tour lambasting the budget as morally bankrupt.

With news of record corporate profits and increased bonuses for those at the top of the financial heap — and on-going income stagnation, job loss, and rising poverty for those in the middle and bottom of the ladder—it’s maddening for progressives to hear our political elites continuing to promote austerity as a means for growth.

Just a year and half ago, Occupy Wall Street was all anyone could talk about.  President Obama won a historic second term running on these themes and announced a new era of liberal governance in his recent Inaugural address.  Yet, even with strong evidence out of Europe that austerity is failing, and public opinion polls in the U.S. showing clear opposition to rising inequality, the political class in Washington is collectively trying to convince itself that America can cut its way to prosperity and economic opportunity for the middle class.

What happened?  And why aren’t we seeing more social protests against an economic and political order that sanctions these outcomes?

There are many culprits in this development, chief of which is the intersection of libertarian economic theory with control of one political party that has strong minority voting power in our constitutional system.  The long term decline of the labor movement and the corporate ownership of media provide additional institutional explanations for why there is not more pushback.

But a more painful explanation might be closer to home.

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The House Republican budget released by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) this morning has little chance of becoming law, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a meaningful document that acts as a weathervane of the GOP’s priorities and views on how to best shape the American economy. And despite the party’s “rebranding” efforts, its budget is more of the same: it adheres almost exactly to the principles outlined by Mitt Romney, it skews heavily toward the wealthiest Americans at the direct expense of the poor, and it aims to put America on an overall economic path that would be painful in both the short- and long-terms.

Take, for instance, the budget’s overall focus on deficits and debt. Ryan and the GOP are arguing that the government has a spending problem that needs to be reined in to allow the economy to grow, and he even cites a Congressional Budget Office report that purports to support that notion:

But a balanced budget will help the economy. Smaller deficits will keep interest rates low, which will help small businesses to expand and hire. It’s no surprise, then, that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office believes that legislation reducing the deficit as much as our budget does would boost gross national product by 1.7% in 2023.

It’s worth noting here that Ryan’s budget only balances if his fantasy assumptions about revenue are correct, but even if it did, a balanced budget won’t help the economy in the short-term. The very CBO report Ryan cites says that an immediate focus on deficit reduction would hamper the economic recovery by knocking 0.6 percent off of growth. And as we’ve pointed out here, government spending has plateaued since President Obama took office. Despite Ryan’s assertion in the budget that “government spending is no substitute for a true recovery led by the private sector,” past recoveries don’t support that notion either. As this chart shows, fiscal policy has aided recoveries from the last two recessions, adding an average of half-a-point to economic growth. But after the stimulus initially aided this recovery, deficit reduction had a negative impact on growth over the next two years:

Ryan is right that the United States has a spending problem, but right now, the problem is that the government isn’t spending enough. European countries that have pursued austerity have slumped back into recessions. But the United States’ pursuit of stimulus put it on a path to recovery, even if a premature focus on debts and deficits has made that recovery more tepid than it should have been. Ryan’s budget would only make that worse in the short-term, to say nothing of what repeating the Republican failures of the past by cutting taxes for the rich and slashing the social safety net would do the long-term prospects of the American economy.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) released the third iteration of the GOP budget on Tuesday morning. The document achieves balance in 10 years by maintaining the high revenue levels and health care savings that Republicans have vociferously opposed and slashing the health and safety net programs that middle and lower income Americans rely on. Top-income earners and corporations, meanwhile, would benefit from huge tax breaks.

Here are the five worst things about Ryan’s budget:

1. GIVES HUGE TAX CUTS TO THE RICH AND CORPORATIONS: Ryan’s plan would reduce both top income and corporate tax rates to 25 percent, resulting in trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. The government would lose roughly $7 trillion in revenues compared to Ryan’s projections, and while he plans to close loopholes to pay for the cuts, he has in the past failed to specify which loopholes he would close, and raising enough revenue from the elimination of tax expenditures would prove politically difficult, if not impossible. Ryan would also convert the corporate tax code to an “international” plan, resulting in an even bigger giveaway to American companies that are already paying historically low tax rates.

2. FORCES SENIORS TO PAY MORE FOR HEALTH CARE: Beginning 2024, the guaranteed Medicare benefit would be transformed into a government-financed “premium support” system. Seniors currently under the age of 55 could use their government contribution to purchase insurance from an exchange of private plans or traditional fee-for-service Medicare. But the budget does not take sufficient precautions to prevent insurers from cherry-picking the the healthiest beneficiaries from traditional Medicare and leaving sicker applicants to the government. As a result, traditional Medicare costs could skyrocket, forcing even more seniors out of the government program. The budget also adopts a per capita cost cap of GDP growth plus 0.5 percent, without specifying how it would enforce it. This makes it likely that the cap would limit the government contribution provided to beneficiaries.

3. JEOPARDIZES MEDICAID: The budget would eliminate the exiting matching-grant financing structure of Medicaid and would instead give each state a pre-determined block grant that does not keep up with actual health care spending. This would shift some of the burden of Medicaid’s growing costs to the states, forcing them to — in the words of the CBO — make cutbacks that “involve reduced eligibility for Medicaid and CHIP, coverage of fewer services, lower payments to providers, or increased cost sharing by beneficiaries—all of which would reduce access to care.”

4. REPEALS HEALTH COVERAGE FROM 30 MILLION AMERICANS: The budget repeals the Affordable Care Act’s requirement to purchase health insurance coverage, the establishment of health insurance exchanges, the provision of subsidies for lower-income Americans, the expansion of the Medicaid program, and tax credits for small businesses that provide insurance coverage. As a result, more than 30 million Americans would lose coverage and the budget would eliminate the new law’s consumer protections, which have already benefited tens of millions of Americans. States across the country are already implementing the law and a growing number of Republican governors have finally agreed to expand their Medicaid programs.

5. CUTS FOOD STAMPS: The budget seeks to turn most social safety net programs into block grants to the states that are modeled after the 1996 welfare reform law. That would result in devastating cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps), women, infant, and children programs, and other parts of the social safety net that keep millions of people out of poverty each year. Since welfare reform occurred 16 years ago, it has failed to reach many families with children in poverty, particularly during the latest economic recession. Ryan’s budget would make most safety programs equally as impotent.

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) previewed the latest version of his budget, which he will formally unveil today, in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, and the proposal closely mirrors both his past budgets and the plans he and Mitt Romney laid out during the 2012 presidential campaign. Like the Romney-Ryan 2012 plans, this version includes massive budget cuts to safety net programs and a major overhaul of the tax code that will largely benefit the wealthy and corporations.

As the 2012 budget did, the 2013 version reduces the number of income tax brackets from six to two, with marginal rates set at 10 percent and 25 percent. It is expected to stick to Ryan’s past tax proposals as well by repealing the Alternative Minimum Tax, cutting the top corporate tax rate to 25 percent, and converting the corporate tax code to an “international” system.

Estimates showed that past plans amounted to $3 trillion tax giveaways to the wealthy, but because of tax increases that took effect in 2013, Ryan’s newest tax cut is even larger. The federal government in all would lose a total of $7 trillion in revenue, according to Center for American Progress Tax and Budget Policy Director Michael Linden, the majority of which would go to the richest Americans and corporations. Reducing the corporate income tax to 25 percent would provide a tax break of more than $1 trillion; further tax changes would result in even bigger cuts. Trillions more would go to the wealthy.

Ryan again insists that those tax cuts won’t actually be realized, since any reform will be neutral thanks to the closure of tax loopholes. But he made similar claims in both 2011 and 2012, and in neither of those instances did he offer specific loopholes for closure, likely because doing so would have proven politically impractical.

Romney and Ryan also insisted that their proposal would cut taxes for every American (especially the wealthy) while not adding a dime to the federal deficit, but nonpartisan analysts found that upholding both of those standards was impossible. The Tax Policy Center found that Romney’s plan would have to make up $4.8 trillion through the closure of tax loopholes; failing that, he would have no choice but to add to the deficit or raise taxes by $2,000 on the average middle class family. Ryan’s version will have to make up even more revenue to avoid similar pitfalls.

Ryan has also stuck to the same spending principles of past budgets. He again turns Medicare into a voucher program and converts many social safety net programs to block grants modeled after the failed 1996 welfare reform law. Those plans would result in higher health care costs to seniors and major cuts to the social safety net, all while his plan gives a massive tax break to the richest Americans.