Two More that go with ‘Roughly 2/3rds of Cuts in Ryan Plan Come from Low-Income Programs’
Greenstein Statement on Chairman Ryan’s Budget Plan
“Chairman Ryan’s sweeping budget plan has been labeled ‘courageous,’ but it’s a cowardly budget in a crucial respect. It proposes a dramatic reverse-Robin-Hood approach that gets the lion’s share of its budget cuts from programs for low-income Americans — the politically and economically weakest group in America and the politically safest group for Ryan to target— even as it bestows extremely large tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans. Taken together, its proposals would produce the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history, while increasing poverty and inequality more than any measure in recent times and possibly in the nation’s history.
Jist of this is: (I learned it from Obama says Ryan—Paraphrased)
That’s because the Ryan plan would generate at least two-thirds — about $2.9 trillion — of its $4.3 trillion in budget cuts over 10 years from programs for people of modest means, while making permanent all of President Bush’s tax cuts for high-income Americans as well as a new estate-tax giveaway in the December 2010 tax package.
Ryan has said that he borrowed some ideas from President Obama’s fiscal commission, which was chaired by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. But in a sharp departure, it stands a core principle of the Bowles-Simpson plan on its head. The co-chairs called for policymakers to set, as a basic principle, that the deficit should be reduced in a way that does not increase poverty and inequality; they called for protecting low-income and vulnerable Americans. The Ryan plan, in contrast, aims by far its most severe blows at those people — even as it drops all of the Bowles-Simpson revenue-raising measures that would secure their largest revenue increases from people at higher income levels.
“House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s plan to convert SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly called food stamps) to a block grant rests on the false claim that the program is experiencing ‘relentless and unsustainable growth’. SNAP’s substantial growth of recent years has come primarily in response to the battered economic circumstances of tens of millions of Americans, showing that, in fact, the program is working as intended – not that it is out of control and contributing to the nation’s long-term fiscal problem.”
The Jist of this is: (But…don’t put facts in my bill proposal! says Ryan—Paraphrased.)
Nor, despite charges to the contrary, is SNAP contributing to the nation’s long-term budget problem. That problem is driven largely by the aging of the population and health care costs (in both the public and private sectors) that are rising faster than the economy — the combination of which will drive up the costs of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security in the coming years — and revenues that are inadequate to cover those rising costs. SNAP is not contributing to this problem, nor are there demographic or programmatic pressures that will cause SNAP costs to grow in the future. Once the economy has fully recovered, SNAP costs are expected to rise only in response to growth in the low-income population and food prices.
I feel that these two articles along with Two-Thirds of the Cuts in Ryan’s Budget Come from Low Income Programs should be read together and in their entirety to get the full picture of what is going on.