Ryan's "Roadmap" (which includes a number of ideas I support, by the way) purports to address the fiscal challenges of our aging population while restoring a culture of self-reliance rather than dependency on government. Yet while liberals have been busy blasting Ryan's proposed trims to Social Security and Medicare, the bigger budget outcomes Ryan proposes have been virtually ignored.
It's worth the full read.
6 comments:
"But it really shows something different: that you can't double the number of seniors on Social Security and Medicare and keep taxes at their recent long-run average of 19 percent of GDP, as Ryan's plan would do."
Would it be helpful to include a box on federal income tax forms where people indicate what percentage of their gross income was paid in taxes? I think people fail to realize how law the effective tax rate is in the United States.
Also, regarding the substance of the piece, I need people to tell me why running deficits for 60 years is bad. America is not a person. When I was sixteen I would talk about how terrible Reagan's deficits were; when I was in my twenties I would hail the GPOTTC for eliminating deficits; but I never honestly figured out why deficits should be a priority. Seems like Clinton claimed that they would eventually effect interest rates.
Deficits aren't terrible, but they aren't good long term. I think the notion that they drive up interest rates is a myth.
What they do do, however, is eventually they use up all the capital that healthy countries invest in the important things they need to do for the future: infrastructure, science research, etc, and you eventually for future generations to pay higher taxes.
Running deficits forever ruins your future.
"for" above should read "force"
In other words, they don't help win the future.
Yeah, that's a good read.
The thing that bugs me about the debate as it's being played out is the general acceptance of the idea that Social Security is in crisis and is part of the deficit problem. SoSec is funded through 2037 and would need only minor tweaks to be sustainable well beyond the foreseeable horizon. There is, however, a general budget crisis and a Medicare crisis, which are much more imminent and much harder to fix. But the guys who have always hated SoSec are using the deficit as an opportunity to try to kill SoSec.
The other thing is the Ryan plan is essentially BS even in its specifics. The new tax code is simply assumed to keep revenue at 19% of GDP as an a priori matter, and even then it won't balance the budget any time soon. However, since the roadmap has such tax cuts for the very wealthy, it would likely product a huge loss in revenue and nonpartisan experts predict revenue along the line of 16% of GDP instead. That's a massive difference.
Right now, the GOP is fundamentally unserious about governing and the deficit. They are an anti-tax cult
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