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(Or, What Happens When Somebody Puts On Their Big Boy Pants)
Paul Ryan is a boyish, six-term Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives. He is the ranking member of the Budget Committee. And he is a grown-up: he is willing to risk his office by putting forward a budget proposal that actually fixes the problem and erases the deficit, but one that opens him up to all manner of attack from the agents of the status quo.
Ezra Klein, in yesterday’s Washington Post:
The boyish Ryan is a conservative darling and the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, but there’s nothing conservative about this document. It does not respect, much less preserve, the status quo. But then, that’s a point in Ryan’s favor. The status quo does not deserve our respect. It is unsustainable. Left unchecked, it will bankrupt our country. On that, Ryan’s radicalism is welcome, and all too rare. The size of his proposal is shocking, but it is proportionate to the size of our problem: According to the Congressional Budget Office, which examined a simplified version of his proposal, it would wipe out our projected long-term deficits.
Obviously, any plan that actually takes on these challenges must be radical in scope — because that is how bad the problem is.
Robert Samuelson, in today’s Washington Post, illuminates the genuine scope of the problem
First, from 2011 to 2020, the administration projects total federal spending of $45.8 trillion against taxes and receipts of $37.3 trillion. The $8.5 trillion deficit is almost a fifth of spending. In 2020, the gap is $1 trillion, again approaching a fifth: Spending is $5.7 trillion, taxes $4.7 trillion. All amounts assume a full economic recovery; all projections may be optimistic. The message: There’s a huge mismatch between Americans’ desire for low taxes and high government services.
Second, almost $20 trillion of the $45.8 trillion of spending involves three programs — Social Security, Medicare (health insurance for those 65 and over) and Medicaid (health insurance for the poor — two-thirds goes to the elderly and disabled). The message: The budget is mainly a vehicle for transferring income to retirees from workers, who pay most taxes. As more baby boomers retire in the 2020s, deficits would grow.
Third, there is no way to close the massive deficits without big cuts in existing government programs or stupendous tax increases. Suppose we decided to cover all future deficits by raising taxes. Taxes would rise in the 2020s by roughly 50 percent from the average 1970-2009 tax burden.
That’s the guts of it. At age 65, average Americans live for another 18 years. Government now subsidizes each of them an average of about $25,000 a year (almost $14,000 Social Security, $11,000 Medicare). We cannot sensibly afford all these subsidies without oppressive tax increases (see above), deep cuts in defense and other programs or immense budget deficits that someday might trigger another financial crisis. Bond buyers might balk at swallowing so much government debt. By the administration’s estimates, that publicly held debt (the accumulation of all annual deficits) balloons from $5.8 trillion in 2008 to $18.6 trillion in 2020.
It is that massive problem that Ryan seeks to solve. If I tried to lay out the plan, I’d manage to miss something, so I refer you to the web site to review it for yourself.
You will undoubtedly hear the protectors of the status quo, those who would comfortably lead us off the cliff we’re approaching, attacking Ryan’s plan for its audacity. And there are not nearly enough steel-spined members of Congress to let a plan like this even get a committee hearing. So the actual solution to our problems dies before it ever had a chance, and we take another step toward that cliff.
But when that day comes, remember that somebody tried to prevent it.
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