New GOP Budget: Same as it ever was

The key fact about this GOP budget is that the differences between it and the last GOP budget — and to a lesser extent between it and the Romney/Ryan plan — are so trivial they’re hardly worth belaboring.

Like his previous budgets, Paul Ryan’s new budget pockets Affordable Care Act savings and revenue as well as revenue from the fiscal cliff tax deal and nominally devotes them to deficit reduction.

However, as in previous budgets, he proposes scrapping the existing progressive income tax rate structure in favor of a system with two-brackets, without identifying how he’d broaden the revenue base. Specifically, he drops the top marginal rate dramatically from 39.6 percent to 25 percent, which is a huge boon to people with high incomes, but pretty meaningless if you’re in the middle class.

As in previous budgets, he doesn’t identify which tax expenditures he’d limit or eliminate to make his overall tax reforms revenue neutral, but as we learned during the presidential campaign, we know this likely means a middle-income tax increase.

As in previous budgets he calls for turning Medicare into a voucher program, but only after 10 years, so that current seniors — who of course are overwhelmingly Republican but overwhelmingly support Medicare as it is — are held harmless

As in previous budgets he repeals the rest of the Affordable Care Act.

As in previous budgets he calls for cutting Medicaid spending by an enormous amount and turning it into a block grant program to be administered by the states.

As in previous budgets he proposes huge but unidentified cuts to other domestic programs, which by and large benefit the poor and middle class.