Today, the House Republicans released their budget. You may be thinking, hey, didn't they release one last week? Well that one they made the completely understandable mistake of forgetting to include numbers. Any at all. But they did have a sweet graph that's just as good:
The underpants gnome comparison is totally played out, don't go there. Well after much hand wringing and raucous laughter from Republicans and everyone else, respectively, they decided that that was just a practice run, and the real budget was coming. And now it's out, and it's even better! Can you guess what the big idea is? If you said 'tax cuts for corporations and the rich' you win! But it also claims to cut the deficit. How does it do both of these, you ask? Well for once they don't just smear the words 'Laffer curve' with their own poo on a sheet of paper, so I guess there's some credit for that, but here are the highlights:
- Eliminate Medicare for everyone not in it already
Thinking big, I like that! Instead, they'll give everyone vouchers worth roughly what the per person cost of Medicare is. Which would be bad since you can buy a lot less coverage alone without the bargaining power of the whole bloc, but not apocalyptically awful except for the fact that the vouchers are tied to inflation, not health care costs, which rise much faster. So you start out getting just a little less, but every year the vouchers cover less and less and you have to spend more and more out of pocket to maintain coverage.
- Give people the choice of two tax plans, then assume they'll voluntarily pay the higher one
This is also great. So instead of just cutting the top tax bracket from 35% to 25%, they give taxpayers the choice of paying either their current amount or a new scheme where the top tax bracket is lowered to $50,000 a year per person or $100,000 per family, but the rate is lowered to 25%. So the super wealthy (500k+) see their tax bill cut by nearly a third, while everyone else stays the same or pays more. Which is apparently why you get the option to stay in the old system. But that's not the real reason. The deficit assumptions they use assume that everyone will choose whichever tax scheme IS WORSE FOR THEM. No rationale is given for this at all.
- Five year spending freeze on everything except the military
Basically every program the government spends on, including schools, SCHIP, state aid, law enforcement, unemployment, and everything else will get a spending freeze with the effect of cuts the size of inflation Interestingly, it's done without regard whatsoever to merit of the programs. Corn subsidies and schools get cut equally. But don't worry, we can spend as much as we want on bombs and guns!
Several people I've read call cutting government spending during a recession 'Neo-Hoover' economics, but that's really unfair to Hoover. He was dealing with a basically unprecedented situation, without Keynes or the rest of modern economic thought, much of which came about directly due to watching his mistakes and learning from them. Deliberately going back to policies known to fail, contra to all logic and economics, deserves a much worse title.
But then again, none of this is going to happen. The truly scary part is that this is the very best the opposition party can come up with. In the Senate, lest we forget, 36 out of 41 Republican senators voted to replace the Obama stimulus plan entirely with $3 trillion in tax cuts. And it only takes 40 votes to stop legislation. Change, for the moment, requires two Republican votes. And this is the course of action they want to take.
To steal a line from the prescient John Cole : "Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years."
