An outstanding op-ed by the Center for American Progress’s Matt Miller lays bare the sad state of affairs in the nation’s opposition party. The GOP’s fiscal guru, Paul Ryan, is a fraud.
Thanks to House budget chief Paul Ryan, it’s possible to measure the size of this fraud. And it’s colossal. As can never be said often enough, Ryan is absurdly hailed as a fiscal “conservative” for a “roadmap” that doesn’t balance the budget until the 2060s and that adds an unthinkable $62 trillion to the national debt between now and then.
And lest you quibble, the excellent fact-checkers at PolitiFact concluded that Miller’s claims are “mostly true.” They agree with Miller on the 50-plus-year timeframe for balancing the budget; they quibble a bit on the $62 trillion in new debt – but they agree that the number “is certainly in the trillions of dollars.” Furthermore, does Ryan seriously expect anyone to take economic projections that stretch forward five decades seriously?
Has everyone forgotten that we had a balanced budget – even a surplus – under Bill Clinton? It wasn’t that long ago, folks. It can be done again if we are willing to be responsible instead of idiotic about revenues. Yes, Bush tax cuts, I’m looking at you for starters.
The GOP “roadmap” is a sham. And Ryan is a fraud. Please, can someone start a grown-up conversation about important things in Washington?
The economy is improving, but still shaky. We need more stimulus.
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p>Balancing the budget right now is like not taking your medication because you’d have to pay for it with a credit card: it only looks like you’re saving money until you spend a week in the hospital as a result.
The time to balance the budget is when we reach the point where inflation is our biggest economic problem. Right now, jobs should still be a higher priority.
What we definitely need, though, is a path to getting the budget balanced long term. The Treasury has not had to pay high interest rates on our debt and that is because of the reputation of our country for fiscal stability. The Republican War on Arithmetic promises to undermine that. If we start acting like a banana republic, then we will have to pay a corresponding amount to service our debt.
When one reflects on the party that opposes science, whose functionaries in Texas oppose even historical truth, whose political representatives fulminated against trying to understand the Arab world during the Iraq fiasco, and which now is proposing fantasy budgets, the threat to the U.S. looks alarming. Few advanced countries have major political parties actively advocating ignorance.
From what I read, his roadmap claimed to be able to eliminate the debt by the end of the century, I don’t understand what David is talking about here.
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p>I haven’t been wowed by Ryan’s recent conversion to cost-cutter. The debt commission correctly identified a gap between revenues and obligations that will have to be closed somehow.
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p>If you did it by cutting you would need to cut $600B/year. If you did it by taxing you would have to take 25% of GDP (customarily we haven’t taken more than 19% whatever the rates are).
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p>But the debt commission projected an average 2.1% growth. If you simply raised average growth to 2.3% you would solve the debt problem. This shouldn’t be hard for a country that averaged over 3% growth for the first 3/4 of the 20th century, and only went down to 2% after the dollar was delinked from gold in the early 70s.
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p>I got these numbers from Louis Woodhill’s article:
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p>Memo To The GOP: Economic Growth Must Come First
http://www.forbes.com/2011/02/…
The growth in GDP was how the U.S. outgrew the debt left over from the Great Depression and World War II.
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p>That, in fact, is an argument for neo-Keynesian fiscal policy. I had no idea, Seascraper, you were an advocate of stimulus spending, but welcome aboard.
like we had in the 90s and then we can reduce the time to a decade or two.
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p>We could also make up some time by repealing Medicare Part D.
not saying tax cut are a failure, but the results of this particular group kind of sucked.
That won’t even be there for me in 30 years never mind 60 years anyway.
SS is in no way in jeopardy, as it stands now if nothing changed you’d be getting 80% factoring in inflation. So using today’s dollars, it would be more. The adjustment is to make it 100%. When Republicans try to use scare tactics and say bankrupt, it means not being able to meet the entire obligation, not that there is no money left.
Or that changes have been made in the Social Security system in the past. Dean Baker, however, does know what he is talking about:
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I’m not banking on one red cent. There is no money in the SS system it’s tied up in treasuries. A lot of our debt is owed to the SS system. I don’t see getting paid on it. EVER. Perhaps if the money actually existed.
Sorry I didn’t link to something. Don’t want to be accused of making stuff up out of thin air.
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p>http://moneywatch.bnet.com/ret…
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p>There ain’t no real money there John, at least not much…
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p>We compounded our debt problem by borrowing from ourselves.
its our other spending/revenue cuts that have forced us to borrow against it.
Methinks you are talking about Medicare.
Every time I hear about the Clinton surplus, I remember it was based on the tech boom that was like the Dutch Tulip Bulb run-up. When it burst, there were a few survivors in a bona fide industry, like Amazon and eBay – but thousands of failed tech compaies that went bankrupt because there were no assets, only ideas and concepts. Just like Clinton benefitted from the recession that ahd actually technically ended in the months before the election, so did Bush suffer from the end of illusory growth, which was entirely lost in the 9/11 atttacks 9 months into his first term.
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p>As far as Part D goes, remember that we in MA were spoiled on that by Senior Pharmacy and Prescription Advantage. there was NO pharmacy coverage nationwide, and much expense was out of pocket for millions.
Clinton benefitted by Bush, Sr.’s tax HIKE, which set the stage for the recovery, which eventually became a bubble.
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p>Bush, Sr. was villified by conservatives for this, and so it is hard to feel symphathy for a GOP that complains that it was really Bush that set the stage for Clinton’s economy.
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p>But it washes: Obama has and will continue to bear all the blame for the present recession, which pre-dates him.
Does it bother you that much when your neighbors by a motorboat?
There must have been an obscure reference to motorboats in CMD’s comments that I missed.
And I mixed up by and buy. I must be getting alzheimer’s.
I think there is plenty of blame to go around regarding this crisis, neither party is blameless. I agree with EaBo that liberals tend to live in the same fantasy that conservatives due when it comes to programs they like. A conservative “endless defense expenditures are revenue neutral!”, a liberal “a massively growing and unsustainable entitlement program is revenue neutral!”. Neither example is living in reality or within our means. To say social security is not a fiscal time bomb is about as logical as saying that global warming is not man made, both are statements willfully ignorant of facts. That said, there are progressive solutions to the social security problem, raising the cap for one, passing a reasonably rated consumption tax to pay into a lockbox that can only go to SS, reducing eligibility and cutting benefits for recipients over a certain (generous) income threshold. Ryans solutions amount to a costly and gradual privatization of both programs without any real savings on the part of government, and in many cases replacing widely popular and successful programs with a botched private program (kinda like Part D) that amounts to a massive giveaway to business.
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p>And back to my earlier comment about blame, there is far more blame to go to Republicans who cut taxes in wartime, passed a massive entitlement program during a wartime, got us involved in a costly and unnecessary war, and took a 1.3 trillion surplus and made it a tenfold deficit. Yet to the tea party and their ilk we didn’t have a deficit or budget problem until Jan. 20. 2009 when they suddenly woke up for some colorful reason.