Paul Ryan Will Not Balance The Budget

Not only will Republican budget guru Paul Ryan’s proposed budget raise taxes on almost everyone, it will also not balance the budget — the one thing it was designed to do!

Here’s the problem. That Congressional Budget Office score that Ryan cites as proof? It doesn’t estimate how much revenue his plan would bring in based on his new tax regime. Because the CBO never scores changes to tax policy — that’s the job of the Joint Committee on Taxation — its score was based on a revenue number (19% of GDP) that came from…where? Oh, right: Paul Ryan. Where did he get that number? He made it up.

The Tax Policy Center, on the other hand, did score Ryan’s tax proposals. Would you be surprised if I told you Ryan’s figures are a steaming pile of bullshit? I didn’t think so:

Just for kicks, here’s the relevant portion of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities’ takedown of the whole ugly thing:

Assertions that the Ryan plan is fiscally responsible rest on a serious misunderstanding of a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis of the plan. CBO only partially analyzed the Ryan plan. Contrary to some media reports, CBO has not prepared an actual cost estimate of it. CBO generally does not produce estimates of the effects of proposed changes in tax policies; that is the responsibility of the Joint Committee on Taxation. In its analysis of the Ryan plan, CBO did not attempt to measure the revenue losses that Rep. Ryan’s proposals would generate.

Instead, as its report states, CBO simply used an assumption specified by Rep. Ryan’s staff that the overall level of revenues would remain unchanged from what the federal government would collect through 2030 under current policies, and would equal 19 percent of GDP in later years. CBO did not find that the Ryan plan actually would achieve these assumed revenue levels. (For commentary by Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center on the widespread misunderstanding of the CBO analysis, see here.)

The reality is different; TPC finds that the Ryan plan would result in very large revenue losses relative to current policies. TPC estimates that even with its middle-class tax increases, the plan would reduce federal revenues to 16 percent of GDP in 2014. Because the tax cuts for the wealthy would dwarf the tax increases for the middle class, the Ryan plan would allow the federal debt to continue growing for a number of decades to come, despite its steep cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Disappointing, but not surprising. Honest Republicans are, after all, an endangered species.

Paul Ryan Wants To Raise Your Taxes

Last month, during a little back-and-forth with a commenter, I conceded that although I completely disagree with it, Paul Ryan’s budget “roadmap” is serious and in good faith (unlike most recent GOP “plans” for major issues).

What I didn’t know at the time was that if you run the numbers, as the Center for Tax Justice has, it turns out that Ryan’s plan has the unique effect of reducing government revenue while raising taxes on the bottom NINETY (90) PERCENT of Americans. (It also, of course, violently cuts programs and services.) I could have sworn Republicans were for lower taxes!

(I’ll note here that I’m not comparing Ryan’s plan to President Obama’s budget priorities, just pointing out an interesting fact.)

Along those lines, Matt Yglesias introduces some necessary dread:

So give Ryan credit. It’s quite difficult to raise taxes on 90 percent of Americans while reducing overall tax revenue, but he’s shown enormous ingenuity in getting the job done. Remember that this is the top House GOP budget guy. If John Boehner becomes Speaker after the midterms, Ryan will be writing budgets for the new majority, presumably animated by the same moral principles that led him to this idea.

Why I Am Not A Conservative

A major topic of this blog since its inception has been the vacuous, uninformed nature of right-wing political discourse. I bemoan this fact because I believe in a robust dialogue, and as a temperament I believe conservatism has much to offer our politics. But what passes for conservatism these days is, in my opinion, a mostly content-free ideology. It’s nice to have this confirmed on my own blog.

A reader named Karl Keller has been commenting, quite passionately, on a few recent posts. I don’t know who Karl Keller is or anything about him, but since I want to take my readers’ dissents seriously, I thought his comments deserve a detailed response, which I try to make after the jump.

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