Tax Justice Blog

 

January 7, 2015 11:24 AM
By Richard Phillips, Research Analyst at CTJ | Permalink |

The new budgetary mantra of the House GOP appears to be: if you can't make the math add up, change the rules of math.

On Tuesday the House did exactly that with its passage of a new rule requiring the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) to use "dynamic scoring" rather than static scores for official cost estimates on proposed tax changes. Dynamic scoring is a controversial method of assessing the effect of tax cuts. It allows lawmakers to claim that a tax reform proposal is revenue neutral, even if it would lose revenue under a conventional score.

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Tax Justice Blog

Cardinal Dolan to give benediction for RNC

Read the entire article by clicking on the following:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/nyregion/new-york-archbishop-will-give-closing-prayer-at-gop-meeting.html?_r=1

Paul Ryan’s Cramped Vision - NYTimes.com

 

Editorial

Mr. Ryan’s Cramped Vision

Published: August 11, 2012 805 Comments

 

Mitt Romney’s safe and squishy campaign just took on a much harder edge. A candidate of no details — I’ll cut the budget but no need to explain just how — has named a vice-presidential running mate, Paul Ryan, whose vision is filled with endless columns of minus signs. Voters will now be able to see with painful clarity just what the Republican Party has in store for them.

As House Budget Committee chairman, Mr. Ryan has drawn a blueprint of a government that will be absent when people need it the most. It will not be there when the unemployed need job training, or when a struggling student needs help to get into college. It will not be there when a miner needs more than a hardhat for protection, or when a city is unable to replace a crumbling bridge.

And it will be silent when the elderly cannot keep up with the costs of M.R.I.’s or prescription medicines, or when the poor and uninsured become increasingly sick through lack of preventive care.

More than three-fifths of the cuts proposed by Mr. Ryan, and eagerly accepted by the Tea Party-driven House, come from programs for low-income Americans. That means billions of dollars lost for job training for the displaced, Pell grants for students and food stamps for the hungry. These cuts are so severe that the nation’s Catholic bishops raised their voices in protest at the shredding of the nation’s moral obligations.

Mr. Ryan’s budget “will hurt hungry children, poor families, vulnerable seniors and workers who cannot find employment,” the bishops wrote in an April letter to the House. “These cuts are unjustified and wrong.”

Mr. Ryan responded that he was helping the poor by eliminating their dependence on the government. And yet he has failed to explain how he would make them self-sufficient — how, in fact, a radical transformation of government would magically turn around an economy that is starving for assistance. At a time when state and local government layoffs are the principal factor in unemployment, the Ryan budget would cut aid to desperate governments by at least 20 percent, far below historical levels, on top of other cuts to mass transit and highway spending.

Those are the kinds of reductions voters of all income levels would actually feel. People might nod their heads at Mr. Romney’s nostrums of smaller government, but they are likely to feel quite different when they realize Mr. Ryan plans to take away their new sewage treatment plant, the asphalt for their streets, and the replacements for retiring police officers and firefighters.

All of this will be accompanied, of course, by even greater tax giveaways to the rich, and extravagant benefits to powerful military contractors. Business leaders will be granted their wish for severely diminished watchdogs over the environment, mine safety and food quality.

Mr. Romney had already praised the Ryan budget as “excellent work,” but until Saturday the deliberate ambiguity of his own plans gave him a little room for distance, an opportunity to sketch out a more humane vision of government’s role. By putting Mr. Ryan’s callousness on his ticket, he may have lost that chance.

The above is from:  Paul Ryan’s Cramped Vision - NYTimes.com

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Ryan to Colo. supporters: I drive a truck. I worked at McDonald’s.I like to camp. I’m you.

 

LAKEWOOD, Colo--Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan took the stage before 2,600 supporters at Lakewood High School Tuesday to promote Mitt Romney's energy proposals, but he had another agenda. Interlaced throughout his speech were subtle, but clear, references to Ryan's common-man appeal. Over the course of his nearly 20-minute address, Ryan discussed working at McDonald's, [...]

Wisconsin Election Results: David Prosser, Ally of Governor Scott Walker, Takes Lead - ABC News

On Wednesday, liberal challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg, an assistant attorney general, had appeared to eke out an upset -- besting Prosser by 204 votes in an unofficial tally. But officials in heavily Republican Waukesha county now say they discovered a counting error that, when rectified, gives Prosser an additional 7,582 votes.

Waukesha county clerk Kathy Nickolaus blamed the error on her failure to save results from the Milwaukee suburb of Brookfield on her database. She told reporters, "This is human error which I apologize for."

Click on the following for more details:  Wisconsin Election Results: David Prosser, Ally of Governor Scott Walker, Takes Lead - ABC News

Representative Ryan Proposes Medicare Plan Under Which Seniors Would Pay Most of Their Income for Health Care | Beat the Press

According to the Congressional Budget Office analysis the benefit would cover 32 percent of the cost of a health insurance package equivalent to the current Medicare benefit (Figure 1). This means that the beneficiary would pay 68 percent of the cost of this package. Using the CBO assumption of 2.5 percent annual inflation, the voucher would have grown to $9,750 by 2030. This means that a Medicare type plan for someone age 65 would be $30,460 under Representative Ryan's plan, leaving seniors with a bill of $20,700. (This does not count various out of pocket medical expenditures not covered by Medicare.)

Click on the following for more details:  Representative Ryan Proposes Medicare Plan Under Which Seniors Would Pay Most of Their Income for Health Care | Beat the Press

Paul Ryan and the Republican Effort to Finally Starve the Beast - E.D. Kain - American Times - Forbes

 

The fact is, right now in the United States we have unemployment hovering above 9%, inflation at a staggeringly low 1.4%, and taxes at an all-time low – especially for the very rich. Further tax cuts or even an extension of the current cuts will not push more money into the economy. Spending cuts on the other hand, will pull a great deal of money out of the economy. With inflation as low as it is, and unemployment as high as it is, the Ryan budget is a roadmap to economic collapse.

Click on the following for more details:  Paul Ryan and the Republican Effort to Finally Starve the Beast - E.D. Kain - American Times - Forbes

Tax Cuts for the Rich on the Backs of the Middle Class; or, Paul Ryan Has Balls | Rolling Stone Politics | Taibblog | Matt Taibbi on Politics and the Economy

 

slobber over all of Ryan’s ostensibly daring proposals, from the Medicare block grants to the more obnoxious Medicare voucher program (replacing Medicare benefits with vouchers to buy overpriced private insurance, which Brooks calls the government “giving you a sum of money” to choose from “a regulated menu of insurance options”).

What he doesn’t mention is that Ryan’s proposal also includes dropping the top tax rate for rich people from 35 percent to 25 percent.

ambitious program to cut taxes for [rich] people , and paying for it by “consolidating job-training programs” and forcing old people to accept reduced Medicare benefits.

Ryan’s act isn’t even politically courageous. It’s canny calculation, but courage it is not. …Ryan is proposing a budget he knows would have no chance of passing in the Senate. He is simply playing out a part, a non-candidate for the presidency pushing a rhetorical flank for an out-of-power party leading into a presidential campaign year. If the budget is a hit with the public, the 2012 Republican candidate can run on it. If it isn’t, the Republican candidate can triangulate Ryan’s ass back into the obscurity from whence it came, and be done with him

Click on the following for more details: Tax Cuts for the Rich on the Backs of the Middle Class; or, Paul Ryan Has Balls | Rolling Stone Politics | Taibblog | Matt Taibbi on Politics and the Economy

Wendell Potter: Pay Much Attention to the Insurers Behind Paul Ryan's Curtain

 

Ryan et al would never propose such a fundamental reshaping of those programs unless they were confident that corporate America stands ready to help them sell their ideas to the public. Like big business CEOs, Congressional Republicans wouldn't think of rolling out Ryan's budget plan without a carefully crafted political and communications strategy and the assurance that adequate funding would be available to carry it out.

Republicans know they can rely on health insurance companies -- which would attract trillions of taxpayer dollars if Ryan's dream comes true -- to help bankroll a massive campaign to sell the privatization of Medicare to the public.

the insurers were lobbying hard for a provision in the bill requiring all of us to buy coverage from them if we're not eligible for a public program like Medicare or Medicaid. They won that round, too. That provision alone will guarantee billions of dollars in revenue the insurers would never have seen had it not been for the bill the president signed.

behind the change in the Medicare program in the 1980s that allowed insurers to offer what are now called "Medicare Advantage" plans. The federal government not only pays private insurers to market and operate these plans, it pays them an 11 percent bonus. That's right: People enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans cost the taxpayers 11 percent more than people enrolled in the basic Medicare program.

The insurers and their allies have demonstrated time and again that they can persuade Americans to think and act -- and vote -- against their own best interests.

 

Click on the following for more details: Wendell Potter: Pay Much Attention to the Insurers Behind Paul Ryan's Curtain