TWO CONSERVATIVE BUDGET PROPOSALS FROM NEVER, NEVERLAND

The latest Budget from the GOP is even worse than Paul Ryan's: Path to Prosperity Debacle

 

The conservatives in Congress apparently think that all Americans are ignorant lemmings.

I recently wrote an article about how the new House GOP budget was even worse than the previous Paul Ryan Budget.  In that article I explained the giant holes in their plan and how they had a big Pentagon slush fund for the Defense Department, but no changes in the Sequester plan that had already seriously cut the Pentagon’s future budgets.

Well, now there are two Republican sponsored budget proposals.  One from the House and one from the Senate, and they both apparently assume that the American public is as “dumb as a stump”.

The Nobel economist, Paul Krugman has written in his recent column in the New York Times that each of these two new budgets “…contains not one but two trillion-dollar magic asterisks: one on spending, one on revenue. And that’s actually an understatement. If either budget were to become law, it would leave the federal government several trillion dollars deeper in debt than claimed, and that’s just in the first decade.”

Krugman goes on to say, “…this isn’t normal political behavior. The George W. Bush administration was no slouch when it came to deceptive presentation of tax plans, but it was never this blatant.”

Krugman isn’t kidding.  Where the GOP has been in the past on their deception and lying about their budget proposals was nothing when compared to the bizarre numbers as presented in these two documents.

Oh, I know that with the current president, there’s no way these budgets are going to become law.  And I am surprised that they have gone as far as they have with these budget numbers, because anyone reading them might end up saying, “We’d better make sure we have another Democrat in the White House after Obama, just to keep bogus budgets like this from becoming law.”

As Krugman states, “…both claim drastic reductions in federal spending. Some of those spending reductions are specified: There would be savage cuts in food stamps, similarly savage cuts in Medicaid over and above reversing the recent expansion, and an end to Obamacare’s health insurance subsidies. Rough estimates suggest that either plan would roughly double the number of Americans without health insurance. But both also claim more than a trillion dollars in further cuts to mandatory spending, which would almost surely have to come out of Medicare or Social Security. What form would these further cuts take? We get no hint.  Meanwhile, both budgets call for repeal of the Affordable Care Act, including the taxes that pay for the insurance subsidies. That’s $1 trillion of revenue. Yet both claim to have no effect on tax receipts; somehow, the federal government is supposed to make up for the lost Obamacare revenue. How, exactly? We are, again, given no hint.”

The point is they have thrown away any caution to the wind as to how outrageous their budget claims are because they just don’t add up, no matter how you do the math….?

Do you remember all the ridiculous noise they made about the expected costs of the Affordable Care Act.  In actuality, The ACA costs are well below even the Congressional Budget Office expectations.  The CBO has now marked its ACA forecast for the next decade down by 20%. The Republicans also tried so hard to shout down the president when he declared that he would cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term. Well, that didn’t happen in his first term, but it did one year later. The deficit in calendar 2013 was less than half its 2009 level, and it is continuing to fall.

Apparently, the conservatives have finally come to understand that Americans now have figured out that tax cuts for the rich will not generate a huge boom and a surge in revenue.  Most Americans have figured out that there is no magic in the Republican’s “supply-side economics”, even though it is a doctrine that the GOP still has many proponents.  The conservatives have been wrong about this concept for decades, but in these two budget proposals it proves that it will still take decades, if ever, to very slowly discard their trickle-down concept.

Just think about what would happen if these budgets became law and we ignored their trillions of unspecified spending cuts and revenue enhancements.  Based on these budgets, we would see major tax cuts for the rich, and those deficits would be paid for by income from the poor and the working class, who would also see severe benefit cuts.

These two budget proposals from the Republicans in the US Congress include bogus incomes, massive tax cuts and trillions in imaginary, unexplained savings.  Their math comes directly from Dr. Suisse. (Probably via Senator Ted Cruz.)

These proposal sare only for laying fiscal fraud upon all of the American people and they go well beyond anything that the conservatives have ever done in the past.  The Republicans in congress apparently think the American public will swallow just about anything they offer.  The reality is that only a small percentage of America will actually be taken in by the likes of these claims.  And that group is fortunately becoming smaller every day.

Let’s hope at some future point this extreme group will eventually totally disappear.

Copyright  G.Ater  2015