January 26, 2011--Paul Ryan's Roadmap

Congressman Paul Ryan, newly ensconced as chairman of the House Budget Committee, was the Republicans' designated-responder last night to President Obama's State of the Union address. (Of course, self-appointed leader of the Tea Party, Michele Bachmann, insisted on offering her own response, which it turns out, as usual, served as comic relief to the very serious president and Congressman Ryan.)

Ryan has been taken more and more seriously of late because he is the only Republican leader who has made the effort to come up with a detailed budgetary and deficit-reduction plan. He published it some months ago under the title, "A Roadmap to America's Future 2.0: The Challenge and the Opportunity." The "2.0," I suppose, was to signal that he's a cool member of the Generation Z. Or whatever.

I am treating him ironically because he is anything but cool or radical or contemporary. His plan and its ideas have not been embraced by anyone of significance within the GOP leadership even though they are in fact right out of the mainstream Republican playbook. The political problem for them is that these ideas are stated so openly and unabashedly that GOP leaders have ignored them since they do not want to be caught with their real agenda exposed.

They prefer to appear as if they care about the middle class while doing the bidding of the wealthy, and as a result John Boehner and Mitch McConnell and other members of the leadership are running away from Ryan's Roadmap since it is so openly anti-middle class, as one can see by looking at the specifics, and so unabashedly caters to the interests of the GOP's real constituency--the top 5-10 percent of earners. Their so-called "job creators."

So at least give Paul Ryan credit for being so unintentionally transparent.

If you are inclined to read Ryan's Roadmap, it is linked below.

As to his ideas, let's take a look for ourselves. Particularly at his tax proposals since changing the taxation system has always been the heart and soul of Republican trickle-down economic policy. Cut all taxes to the absolute minimum (particularly for corporations and the wealthy), eliminate the remaining regulations, and the free market will solve our problems. We have seen this enacted in bold type from Ronald Reagan through George W. Bush and we should know by now the consequences--the doubling and tripling of the national debt while the middle class falls further and further behind.

So now enter Paul Ryan.

Ryan's Roadmap relies on substantially privatizing Social Security and Medicare (privatization, in addition to cutting taxes, being the GOP's other panacea), while at the same time repealing estate and corporate taxes and instituting a national sales tax (akin to a value-added-tax) of 8.5 percent on virtually all purchases an services. And while no marginal income tax rates would be increased, the design of the plan and the taxes that Ryan calls for would redistribute the tax burden down the income scale, resulting in an overwhelming majority of Americans ultimately paying more in taxes than they would under President Obama’s plans since VAT taxes are among the most regressive because they fall disproportionately on lower- and middle-income people.

Under Ryan’s proposal:

– Federal taxes would be lowered for the richest 10 percent and increased, via the VAT, for all other income groups.

– The bottom 80 percent of taxpayers would pay about $1,700 more on average per year than they would have been if President Obama’s tax proposals had been fully enacted.

– The richest one percent would pay about $211,300 less on average per year than they would have been if President Obama’s proposals had been approved.

– The poorest 20 percent would pay 12.3 percent of their income in taxes, more than what they would have paid under the President’s proposal, while the richest one percent would pay 15 percent of their income in taxes, which is considerably less than they would have paid under the President’s tax policies.

Under Ryan's plan, this shift in tax burden not only would force the middle- and lower-classes to pay disproportionately more than the rich, but it would also result in the government collecting $2.0 trillion less over a decade than it would if Obama's plan had been enacted. All of it would be added to the deficit that Ryan and his colleagues say they abhor.

These regressive and deficit-busting ideas are standard GOP issue, but are so bluntly stated by Ryan that GOP leaders have distanced themselves from them. They prefer spin, manipulation, and hypocrisy when talking about economic issues.

If you add Ryan's tax proposals to his plans to privatize a large portion of Social Security (we know how far that got when George Bush proposed this and we know how disadvantageous it would be to most seniors) and to eliminate the single-payer Medicare system with vouchers that would require those eligible to buy their own insurance, it is no wonder he has few supporters even within his own party.

If Ryan's ideas are implemented, most effective programs, among many others, in education (student loans, for example) and research (federally-supported medical research) would be substantially defunded. In addition, his tax plan would make the deficit even worse while further depressing the incomes of the middle class and working poor.

For sure these are "ideas," as opposed to generalizations, rhetoric, and pieties; but they are nothing short of ruinous. Sad to say, since he has assumed a position of considerable congressional power, he will have to be taken "seriously," rather than merely dismissed as these ideas for the most part deserve to be.