There is so much to complain about in Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan that I hardly know where to begin, but I am going to start with the fact that we have a Democratic president. What makes Paul Ryan think that he can get a Democrat to destroy Medicare and Medicaid, eliminate all taxes on foreign profits, lower the top marginal income tax rate to 25%, eliminate the Alternative Minimum Tax, raise defense spending, decimate spending on research and development, and social spending, and add hundreds of billions to the deficit? And he wants to do it by reneging on the deal the Republicans made with the administration during the debt ceiling fiasco, while ignoring the sequestration that resulted from the failure of the Supercommittee to strike a deal.
This isn’t a budget for a divided government. It’s an ideological budget that bears no relationship to reality. The media should respond with indignation and derision. It’s bad enough that the numbers don’t add up. Even if the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire and there is no new Medicare doctor reimbursement fix, the CBO estimates that Ryan’s budget will add $240 billion to the debt over the next decade. Meanwhile, it will provide a tax cut of at least $150,000 per year to our wealthiest families. That’s over a million dollar giveaway over the next decade, and then you can start compounding the interest.
It’s bad enough that this budget would be a disaster for the vast majority of Americans. But it bothers me more that the Republicans continue to act like they have some mandate to force their ideology on a Democratic Senate and administration. They control the House. That’s it. They have a responsibility to help the president govern. And all they do is lie and obstruct and give us ridiculous plans that no Democrat could ever support.
We need a national conversation on what should be expected from a minority party in a divided government, because what we’re getting from the GOP is just obnoxious gridlock and a bad credit rating. And can they ever keep their word? What kind of party makes a deal and then reneges on the deal at the first opportunity?
I know this is the way that you think, and that I think, and that a great many of our legislators used to think…
But today? Republican candidates view their job as empowering themselves and their party, or at least sticking it to those hippies in America who don’t see the golden light of austerity and government being in a women’s uterus.
They don’t even understand the government they are a part of, so they don’t even know that they are breaking it in such a way as to violate the very essence of what our founding fathers ACTUALLY intended to create.
The Republicans are done as a party of government. They may still legislate and win elections, but they are no longer concerned with the future of this nation or their fellow citizens. The only way to rectify this is for them to go the way of the Whigs, and those conservatives actually concerned with governing to start a new party (which I think we need, a second REAL party that is).
Just my cynical views as of today.
I used to think this about the GOP, in some ways I still do. But look at how the GOP was originally formed. People from already existing parties united and took their infrastructure with them since individual political machines were more dominant at the time.
I’m not sure it’s even possible to destroy the modern parties today without huge changes to the system itself.
You should be thanking Paul Ryan for putting a great big target sign in the middle of GOP Presidential and congressional aspirations. Will Mitt Romney have the balls to reject the budget – or will we get more weasel words? Has Limbaugh endorsed the plan or is it in limbo?
this is who they are. no shock
they really need to get a taste of their own medicine, in any way possible.
I know it’s impossible, but I’d love to see Begala’s suggestion come true: defund the red states. Or maybe do it district by district, so for example only Paul Ryan’s district finds itself bereft of any support from the feds, while the rest of WI does fine. Shut down their military bases and national guard batallions. Stop funding their public schools the red staters claim to hate so much. And above all, no more social security for them.
Impossible, I know. But a boy can dream, can’t he?
Patronage, it’s called patronage.
But they won’t. The media have stopped expecting the GOP to be realistic or responsible, ever. To the media, the GOP is like the worthless layabout cousin you can’t stand but the rest of the family puts up with because “he’s like that.”
No. To the media, the GOP is like the worthless layabout cousin that it can’t come to admit is worthless or layabout, so it keeps fantasizing that the cousin will be getting a job and moving out of mom’s basement, any day now. And tells all its friends that that’s what’s already happened.
So true.