Paul Ryan’s latest budget has the same goal as his last three budgets: It slashes taxes for the rich while slashing pretty much everything for everyone else.
The biggest benefit will go to the richest .01 percent — who have seen their share of income quintuple in the last forty years.
Those who earn over $1,000,000 a year would see an average break of $200,000 a year.
Because during a recovery where 95 percent of the benefit has gone to the richest 1 percent, somebody has to stand up for gluttony.
Paul Ryan’s entire argument to justify his budgets is that America is facing a debt crisis. It’s the fundamental premise of his worldview, as summed up by Jonathan Chait.
In Ryan’s Randian hellscape, everything must be done to tame the debt in the next ten years, except anything that could hurt the GOP immediately with seniors, though huge cuts to Medicare will follow. And taxes must never be raised, nor may any tax break be eliminated. Also, we should spend more on defense.
Thus incredible cruelty must be inflicted from the cuts he proposes to the programs the keep America’s working poor and elderly from abject poverty.
Greg Sargent looked at a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities study and found that “the Ryan budget would cut $2.7 trillion from Medicaid and subsidies to help people buy private insurance, leaving 40 million people uninsured by 2024. It would cut food stamps by $137 billion over 10 years; Pell Grants by up to $125 billion; $385 billion from mandatory programs helping poor and moderate income Americans such as SSI; and so on.”
So how does a man who would subject millions to poverty publicly feign as if he is actually interested it reducing it?
He uses dubious evidence to suggest our anti-poverty programs do not work and ignores proof that the War on Poverty reduced poverty by 42 percent during its peak years and by 10 percent since 1967 when all government safety-net programs are factored in.
Meanwhile, he wants you to ignore your lying eyes that may think they’ve seen George W. Bush’s massive tax cuts followed by the worst job growth, economy and deficits since World War II.
If Paul Ryan believes that there is a debt crisis and isn’t willing to ask the rich to pay one penny more to prevent it, then he is a coward. If Paul Ryan believes there’s a debt crisis and is offering the rich more tax breaks, then he is sadistic.
The more generous conclusion is he doesn’t believe there’s a debt crisis. He believes the real danger America faces is that our richest Americans aren’t rich enough. America’s anti-poverty programs are a sort of economic carbon pollution warming the economic atmosphere and stifling the trickle-down effect. If we could just starve the poor a bit more and unload a dump truck of cash on the rich, then it will rain.
Paul Ryan has faith — in the rich. Give them more money because they’ll know what to do with it — unlike a single mother on food stamps.
