Budget Dreams, Budget Nightmares
The Republicans seek to tax less, spend less, and reform some entitlements. A thumbnail sketch of their plan:
Deficits/Debt
The Republican budget achieves lower deficits than the Democratic plan in every year, and by 2019 yields half the deficit proposed by the president. By doing so, it controls government debt: Under this plan, debt held by the public is $3.6 trillion less during the budget period.
Spending
The Republican budget gives priority to national defense and veterans’ health care. It freezes all other discretionary spending for five years, allowing it to grow modestly after that. It also places all spending under a statutory spending cap backed up by tough budget enforcement.
Energy
The Republican budget lays a firm foundation to position the United States to meet three important strategic energy goals: reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil, deploying more clean and renewable energy sources free of greenhouse gases, and supporting economic growth. The budget accomplishes these things by rejecting the president’s cap-and-trade scheme, by opening exploration on our nation’s oil and gas fields, and by investing the proceeds in a new, clean energy trust fund, infrastructure, and further deficit reduction.
Entitlements
The Republican budget also takes steps towards fulfilling the mission of health and retirement security, in part by making these programs fiscally sustainable. The budget moves towards making quality health care affordable and accessible to all Americans by strengthening the relationship between patients and their doctors, not the dictates of government bureaucrats.
I have a better chance of being opening day third baseman for the Chicago White Sox than this alternative budget has of passing Congress and becoming law. So, why bother? Why have the committee minority staff spent thousands of hours toiling over a budget that will, at best, be an historical curiosity in the Barack Obama Memorial Wonk Museum someday?
Paul Ryan, ranking minority member on the House Budget Committee, explains:
As the opposition party, we believe this moment must be met by offering the American people a different way forward — one based on our belief that America is an exceptional nation, and we want to keep it that way. Our budget applies our country’s enduring first principles to the problems of our day. Rather than attempting to equalize the results of peoples’ lives and micromanaging their affairs, we seek to preserve our system of protecting our natural rights and equalizing opportunity for all. The plan works to accomplish four main goals: 1) fulfill the mission of health and retirement security; 2) control our nation’s debts; 3) put the economy on a path of growth and leadership in the global economy; and 4) preserve the American legacy of leaving the next generation better off.
Like the Democratic budget, it is a political document and reflects the GOP’s basic belief in an agenda that has remained unchanged since 1980: low taxes, high defense spending, and smaller government.
Ross Douthat finds the budget quaint:
But sometimes naiveté is just naiveté. Sometimes, putting your least-popular ideas together in one agenda just makes it easier for your opponents to run circles around you. And right now, I think the country could use a right-of-center party that paid a little more attention to its messaging, and a little less attention to its blueprints for the ideal small-government society.
That’s one way to look at it. But Douthat fails to take into account the state of the GOP and why a document like this was absolutely necessary to reaffirm “first principles” – even if it beggars belief as far as its numbers are concerned and has no chance of passage. The Democratic budget reflects a party in the ascendancy. It is a confident party, swaggering across history’s canvass painting a future that is free from want, throwing around money, sticking its nose into the business of business, dictating to the CEOs of huge corporations, all in the fervent belief they are saving America — even saving capitalism. They believe their ideas triumphed at the polls and that their mandate for “change” is broad and deep.
The current state of the Republican Party offers a sharp contrast to the Democrats. There is no confidence, no swagger. There is a tentativeness to their actions, even a plaintiveness to their arguments. They too, want to save America. But not so much from the current financial crisis as from what Ryan believes is “the third and final great wave of progressivism.”
Their coalition fractured and their future prospects dimmed by changing demographics and a damaged brand, Republicans needed a statement that incorporated their core beliefs — if only to remind them who they were and where they came from.
In that sense, the alternative budget is more akin to a manifesto than it is a blueprint for spending. The GOP needed this. And despite the expected ridicule from the Democrats and the short shrift the plan received in the press, as a starting point for a way to regain its stature as a serious party with serious ideas, it’s a fine start.
This was a great read – even though I’m sure all of us would like to see even more cutting of gov’t spending, esp. in a document that is more about taking a stance than actually creating law, it’s good to hear someone see this as a good starting point.
I should say my own opinion is that given how awfully slanted the MSM is, and the fact that President Obama and the Democrats can still use Bush-bashing effectively, the GOP is in an awful situation. It could be exactly right on any number of issues, but like the tea parties, one wonders if the message is getting through to anyone.
To say that the Republican/conservative philosophy has no hope is to surrender to popular media myth and prematurely acknowledge the success of a Left/progressive agenda that hasn’t even begun to be implemented as envisioned. When that happens, the GOP needs to be there with empathy and a sensible alternative, reminding responsible working Americans and taxpayers of what it used to be like and can be again (because Republicans have come back from the wilderness again and again.) There is no time like the present for laying out the strategy, and Paul Ryan is as bright and articulate as spokesperson for the conservatives as Barack Obama is a cheerleader for Socialism and the Left.
I’m optimistic that America will, once again, see the light and sweep the Left and its failures back to Europe and into the dustbin of history.
I AM doing something constructive with my time!
Geeze…
If the GOP is going to play at being the Junior Fascist Party, then I’ll continue to vote for the Real Fascist Party… The GOP is filled with liars that pretend to be conservatives and RINOs that walk across the isle on their kneepads to give a Lewinski to any democrat that whips it out (like, oh, John McCain!).
At least the “Progressives” are recognizable as the fascists they are, and don’t appologize for it (even though they try to change the language).
I will Continue to Punish the GOP for lying and the American People for being idiots, so long as they continue to drive this nation into the ground.
When the people actually wake up, and use either political force or real bullets, I’ll get back on board. Till then, I’ll keep voting for the punisher, the guy Quin Hillyer calls “Il Duce!”
What do you mean, “Congrats for caring about…….., but get a life and do something constructive!” Get a life yourself. It was hard to read your article after being insulted, so I didn’t! BTFW (by the f’king way) I might have a helluva lot better life than you, AND I’m informed as well. I have a 6 hdcp for my golf game, go to my golf course 5x/week after work, I run marathons every two years, I have a job I like that’s lucrative as well, 2 kids still at home, and………….well you get the picture. How’s your golf game and running game?
As far as one of your points I read probably too quickly……..actually it’s easy to describe how much $.3T is. It’s about 1/4th of the income taxes paid to the fed govt for a year. So there, use that. It’s not difficult — although no one ever mentions that. A trillion is almost a year’s worth of U.S. taxes! Not complicated! And since only about 50M workers pay the taxes, that’s $20k apiece. And I pay several times that amount to the fed, in JUST ordinary income taxes. So it’s not hard to explain it in a way every federal income-taxpayer can understand. And in a few more years I’ll be going “John Galt” and Obama or his leftist successor can kiss my big taxes goodbye. We’ll be in massive meltdown by then anyway……..and I’ll be in a low-tax state, drawing out just enough from my IRA to stay under the “high-tax federal radar”.
A Melange: President TDB, Sexting, Oprah
These stories currently on the wires are unrelated, unless you consider that they all reflect some form of human frailty and/or idiocy.
Gimme an S, gimme a T, gimme an I, gimme an M, gimme a U, gimme an L, gimme another U, gimme an S! S-T-I-M-U-L-U-S! YAAA!
Hold onto your shoes! You’re all, or most of you, are about to be stimulated! Yee-hah!
President TDB, for Trillion Dollar Baby, made sure in all his generosity dispensing billions to banks, insurance companies, auto makers, credit card issuers, and other well-deserving recipients of his boundless largesse, that the wee people, not the leprechauns, weren’t forgotten.
Whether they voted for him or not, most working taxpayers will be receiving–good thing you’re sitting down for this news!–a grand total of about $10-$15 a week! There are some qualifiers, of course, but legally married couples could get up to $20! (http://www.walletpop.com/taxes/article/_a/bbdp/here-comes-your-stimulus-bonus/406933?icid=main|htmlws-main|dl3|link3|http%3A%2F%2Fwww.walletpop.com%2Ftaxes%2Farticle%2F_a%2Fbbdp%2Fhere-comes-your-stimulus-bonus%2F406933)
Before you dash out to Burger King and blow that windfall, just be advised that everything you eat, drink, consume in any way, such as everything in BK or Mickey D’s, supermarkets, department stores, gas stations, as well as the heating oil and electricity you use, the cigs you smoke and the booze you drink, will soon reflect the price of President TDB’s war on carbon emissions.
Translation: You will be paying more for those everythings, in some cases a lot more, but TDB will still be able to say he didn’t raise your taxes. Those dastardly oil companies, utility companies, and everyone else are just charging more, for some inexplicable reason, probably for a greedy, insatiable, capitalistic reason.
In any event, it’s all former president Bush’s fault. If you haven’t already noticed, that’s the mantra for the TDB regime and will be for the next four years. Even Bush’s tax cuts will be the cause of all working people paying more in taxes.
How’s that? Pay attention, now!
When the much-reviled President GWB’s tax cuts are allowed to expire in 2010, American workers will be paying even more money to the government, through the nose or through some other body aperture. But, again, TDB won’t be raising your taxes. He and his Democratic congressional cohorts will just not be renewing Bush’s tax cuts. See why Bush is responsible, now? If he had pushed for no sunset on his cuts or a twenty year window you would still have them next year and beyond to 2020.
Suggestion: Hold off on Burger King and instead use coupons and skip the temptation to superzize. Bank that ten or twenty dollar weekly gift from Obama. You’ll need it to pay your future taxes. Better still, since your bank may go belly-up, stuff it under a mattress. At least then it will afford you some, temporary, cushioning.
Any Obama voters ready to repent? If not, just remember he’s only been in office for 70 days. Imagine the havoc he will wreak over the rest of his term!
Oh, yeah. If you’re among the 38% of Americans who don’t pay any federal income taxes anyway or if you don’t bother to work at all, no worries, you’re immune from the hikes in payroll taxes. You will be coughing up more for everything else but take solace in the fact they’re not direct taxes. Indirect taxes are easier on the wallet, right?
Sexting and Parenting, Or How Dumb Parents Don’t Teach Their Children Well: On different but no less disturbing news, some teenies are fighting back over their constitutional and God-given right to be junior amateur porn stars by disseminating child pornography without being charged with disseminating child pornography.
The topic of “sexting” by teenies, the super fun extra-curricular and co-curricular activity of posting pictures of themselves partially clad or in their birthday suits by cell phone has been the subject of recent articles here, notably, “Teen Sexting, Texting, and Suicide,” http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=924. There are always little quirks that distinguish the stories, however.
For example, a federal judge in a Pennsylvania case, “temporarily blocked a prosecutor from filing child pornography…
(Read the rest at http://genelalor.com/)
Good post, and I like the Trillion Dollar Baby meme for Obama. Hey, the Obama “tax cut” is worse than you described. It’s $400 = $8/week for worker, double for hus/wife, but it phases out for most people smart enough to read pajamasmedia (with higher incomes)……..thus, we get zero.
Another thing, Bush’s 1st summer, ’01 passing terrific tax cuts, actually was only passed because the Democrats in the Senate required it to expire after 10 years. So, that wasn’t Bush’s fault. And the Dems in the Senate didn’t want the Alternative Min Tax (AMT) to be repealed. BTW, Clinton vetoed the repeal in ’99. His lack of signature cost me $20,000 last year. Thanks BILL !! We are certainly entering a new level of tax hell with Obama/Pelosi…….at a tipping point in our economic history when our private sector can least afford it. It seems everything Obama wants to do and is doing, is damaging to our private sector vitality. We’re in BIG trouble.
Our response: http://pushbackuntil.com
If we do not do something to rescue our country, no one else will. Certainly not an irresponsible, uncontrolled, and undisciplined Congress. Because they are the ones pushing us closer and closer to bankruptcy. So will we stand around and watch? Or will we do something about it? I, for one, choose to do something about it.
Push Back Until!