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Paul Ryan's (GOP) Alternative [Budget]
enc0re
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So here's this guy. Paul Ryan.
Congressman from Wisconsin, ranking Republican on the Committee on the Budget. As opposed to so much of the GOP, instead of nay-saying and whining, he has come out with an actual suggestion ("Roadmap") on fixing the deficit.
His full proposal can be found here. It has been CBO scored, the full report of which can be found here. Obligatory article from The Economist here.
Highlights:
Real Gross National Product per Capita under Ryan's Budget (solid line) and current law (dashed line).
Federal Debt Held by the Public under Ryan's Budget (solid line) and current law (dashed line).
This is (mostly) accomplished by cutting entitlement spending. Medicare would be replaced with a "buy insurance voucher," indexed to the average of inflation (CPI-U) and medical inflation (CPI-M). Social Security benefits are cut for younger workers today, and they have the option of further cuts in exchange for diverting some payroll taxes into private retirement accounts.
So, Paul Ryan.
More Jack Ryan?
Or more Andrew Ryan?
Congressman from Wisconsin, ranking Republican on the Committee on the Budget. As opposed to so much of the GOP, instead of nay-saying and whining, he has come out with an actual suggestion ("Roadmap") on fixing the deficit.
His full proposal can be found here. It has been CBO scored, the full report of which can be found here. Obligatory article from The Economist here.
Highlights:
Real Gross National Product per Capita under Ryan's Budget (solid line) and current law (dashed line).
Federal Debt Held by the Public under Ryan's Budget (solid line) and current law (dashed line).
This is (mostly) accomplished by cutting entitlement spending. Medicare would be replaced with a "buy insurance voucher," indexed to the average of inflation (CPI-U) and medical inflation (CPI-M). Social Security benefits are cut for younger workers today, and they have the option of further cuts in exchange for diverting some payroll taxes into private retirement accounts.
So, Paul Ryan.
More Jack Ryan?
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He's very obviously Andrew Ryan. He's even a huge fan of Ayn Rand!
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
Not part of this CBO analysis. The CBO bit was done assuming the current tax scheme stays in place.
Then we mail out bootstraps to every American.
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
You can't give them bootstraps, that would be socialism.
He gives away copies of Atlas Shrugged? Sounds like he's on the side of the moochers to me.
Also on Steam and PSN: twobadcats
This too, of course. Someone (Sullivan?) posted a chart of projected budget vs. actual budget over the last three decades and they're horribly unreliable five years out much less seventy.
The GOP's entire platform is a publicity stunt.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Government owns the means of production (of bootstraps)? That's super socialism!
I propose we issue loans equal to the retail cost of each book at 22% interest. Then we package these loans and sell some as investment-grade and take insurance out on the remainder before selling the re-packaged insurance policies to everyone else.
But if we can't produce bootstraps, and we can't give them bootstraps, and they can't afford bootstraps, where does that leave us.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Commie-fascist-Obama-socialism.
If we do absolutely nothing the base components of bootstraps will materialize out of thin air
We were supposed to have a 1 and a half trillion dollar surplus as of this year, according to the 10-year scoring of Clinton's final budget.
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
The poor have to think outside the box. They need to rip out their hair, weave it into something bootstrap like, and then pull themselves up by that.
Until they can afford real bootstraps, obviously. Then John Galt will sell them some, because he's the paragon of moral virtue.
Awesome.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
For example: obviously Medicare/aid and Social Security will need some reform to keep from killing the budget. What are the alternatives, and their desirability, to the proposed?
if we'd privatized social security the entire program would be bankrupt. and the crisis would have involved tons of public money and would have been even more seriosu than it was.
Also Ryan's proposal essentially replaces Medicare with vouchers tied to inflation rates. Anyone who buys health insurance will tell you private insurance is going up much faster than standard inflation. No mention of any type of price controls either so it pretty much trashes Medicare and tells everyone to fuck off.
Social Security's "crisis" is generally overblown. I tend to favor abandoning the idea that it's each individual providing for themselves and make it explicitly a social safety net. End the exemption for social security taxes on income over whatever it is now, 93k? That by itself probably keeps it fiscally stable for another couple generations, possibly in perpetuity as growth rates stabilize and hopefully Latin America and Southeast Asia's economies start growing, lessening the immigration demand.
Also helpful budget wise: not spending so fucking much on defense.
See, I think the problem is the general health care system being ridiculously fucking expensive instead of it just being a matter of old people are expensive to cover. Yes, they are more expensive than younger people, but the fundamental problem is general health care costs, not Medicare itself.
If you can get a reasonably accurate and consistent means-testing program that reviews the means frequently enough that we won't leave seniors eating cat food through Congress sure. As for reducing payroll tax rates, I'd have to look at the math after the cap is removed.
Of course, the bolded means that this is all circle jerking of a different sort.
General healthcare costs are rather difficult to trim right now without massively fucking someone.
Personally I'm in favor of streamlining our medical education system, instituting a one-time forgiveness of like 50% of med school related debt (which the banks will scream about, but fuck 'em) and implementing reasonable cost controls. But I don't think that'd ever fly.
A 401k system
so when the market craps out again all the seniors are left with shit?
i might support such an idea with much much stronger financial regulation
The market outperforms social security over any forty-year period. Seniors would only be totally fucked if they only invested in the last five years or so of their working careers, which isn't possible under a forced plan.
I can get behind some this. Thing is corruption aside Medicare runs much less overhead administratively than private insurance. We could beef up enforcement quite a bit and still be cheaper than profit driven systems. Namely because right now private insurance seems to employ 45 people to tell me to go fuck myself on every single claim.
/sigh
Just from an outsiders perspective here-why is military spending not being cut? While you may be involved in 2 conflicts, the US is spending enough for WW3.
Without real cost controls I really don't think it'd do as much as is generally believed.
Personally I prefer the Swiss/Dutch system.
Regardless, I'm glad that we can at least all agree that some kind of entitlement reform is needed for fiscal solvency. Other budget trimming measures would certainly help as well - I really don't understand why we're building the Gerald Ford-class carriers - but Medicare and Social Security are the storms on the horizon.
Only rich people deserve to live long, healthy lives? The solution of "let the poor die" is a huge step back in our already antiquated system.
A lot of factors:
1) The Republicans would go fucking nuts and get endless air time to talk about how the Democrats are gutting the military. And DC conventional wisdom is that Democrats hate the military. Americans love the military (especially you know, soldiers) and it would be framed as an attack on that august institution.
2) Defense contractors give a lot of money to politicians.
3) The Pentagon likes keeping its massively corrupt bureaucracy employed, and will leak to the media that the Democrats are being mean to them, triggering a second round of 1
4) Defense contractors cleverly spread out the production of parts for their weapons systems across many states (F-22 had parts made in 46 states, as an example) so that if a Senator votes to cut that system, s/he is almost assuredly voting to kill jobs in his own state, which s/he will then hear about in the next election.