Paul Ryan's budget plan

Columnists and editorial boards from around the country are weighing in on the federal budget plan unveiled this week by U.S. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis. What follows is a bit of the buzz.

From a Washington Post editorial:

The first thing to praise about House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's budget plan, unveiled Tuesday, is that it exists. The Wisconsin Republican has produced a plan to deal with the debt, which is more than his Democratic colleagues or President Obama can say.

It is brave of Ryan to risk the inevitable -- and, indeed, swiftly ensuing -- condemnations of the plan as an assault on seniors and the poor.

The Ryan plan taxes too little and cuts too much. Ryan proposes a long-overdue overhaul of the tax code. But he balks at the notion that additional revenue is needed to underwrite the needs of an aging society.

We worry that too many of the cuts come from food stamps and other programs for the poor. Ryan would cut $735 billion from Medicaid over the next decade, transforming it into a block grant to the states.

The theory is that this would give states flexibility and reduce their incentives to spend more. The reality would mean dropping beneficiaries, reducing services or, likely, both.

Seniors and patients with disabilities would shop for insurance on a Medicare exchange along the lines of the exchanges in the new health-care plan (which Ryan would abolish); the plans would receive a set amount from the government and would have to agree to accept all beneficiaries to avoid cherry-picking the healthiest.

The Congressional Budget Office concluded that "most elderly people would pay more for their health care than they would pay under the current Medicare system." But the current system is unsustainable.

Would Ryan's plan save money by relegating seniors to coverage with fewer services and lower-quality care, or by requiring them to pay unduly higher costs? Or would it achieve savings by giving competing providers an incentive to deliver care more efficiently? That deserves debate.

In a statement Tuesday, White House press secretary Jay Carney said the president believes "there is a more balanced way to put America on a path to prosperity."

What would that path be, Mr. President?

From a St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial:

The Ryan plan offers a big bouquet to wealthy Americans, cutting their tax rates and eliminating the estate tax and taxes on capital gains and dividends. The richest 1 percent would see their taxes cut in half.

Ryan's bill is a potpourri of crackpot Republican ideas -- a "business consumption tax" that is effectively a sales tax that falls most heavily on the poor and middle class, the discredited trickle-down illusion of Reaganomics, "flat" tax rates and the shredding of the social services safety net. Defense spending would not be cut. But spending on veterans' health care would be.

Clearly the nation's debts are not sustainable. Spending must be cut. But it must be done fairly, in combination with new revenue generated from those who can afford it.

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Eventually, someone has to pay for all the health care the elderly get. In the past, the cost has been passed on to younger workers. As the senior population expands and the labor force fails to keep pace, that trick will no longer be feasible.

When a Ponzi scheme runs out of victims, it ends in tears.

Critics can offer different solutions, but there is no escaping the constraints. The reason people will dislike what Ryan offers is not that he's needlessly cruel. It's that his plan confronts reality, and reality bites.

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From a Los Angeles Times editorial:

The overriding factor in the country's long-term fiscal mess is the growth in health care costs -- in particular, in the Medicare and Medicaid programs.

But instead of coming up with better ways to slow health care inflation and expand access to care, Ryan's budget would gradually reduce the amount of the bill for Medicaid and Medicare that the federal government pays -- by punting the cost problems in Medicaid to states and in Medicare to the elderly.

On the plus side, Ryan's proposal borrows some of the good ideas put forth in recent months by independent deficit commissions. Unfortunately, it rejects one of the central tenets of those plans: that spending cuts can't solve the problem alone, but must be accompanied by some increase in tax revenue.

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From a San Jose Mercury News editorial:

Ryan has an alternative. He would instead inflict pain solely on children, the poor, the elderly of all income levels and the disabled.

Unbelievably, the Republican plan spares those at the upper end of the income scale from any sacrifice at all -- an astonishing statement of ideology.

Here's the ultimate hypocrisy: Medicare is so popular that the GOP won the House partly by bashing Democrats' plans to cut $500 billion from it -- a drop in the ocean compared with this proposal.

Ryan's plan is not even a true attempt to reduce the deficit. Its main purpose seems to be financing massive tax cuts for the wealthy.

The long-term deficit, driven largely by health care spending, poses a great challenge. It's now up to President Obama and leaders in the Senate to come up with a plan that is fiscally responsible without destroying the American dream.

From a Dallas Morning News editorial:

Paul Ryan isn't always right. What he is, though, is serious. If you quibble with his methods, don't dismiss them as madness.

Ryan, with this proposal, steps into a leadership vacuum. Obama effectively stiffed his own debt commission, ignoring its recommendations.

Ryan's proposal puts into context the firefights over continuing resolutions, a pending government shutdown and nondiscretionary spending. Ryan dares to propose significant changes to Medicare and Medicaid funding, two of the so-called third rails of American politics.

He expects commensurate blowback, and he hasn't been disappointed. Start with "extremist," and work your way left.

Wouldn't it be refreshing for the Democrat Obama and the Republican Ryan, two bright policy wonks, to sit face to face in a room and find some common ground on the issue most weighing on Americans' futures?

It's not enough to speak in somber tones about the need for fiscal responsibility while arguing against the necessary sacrifices to bring it back to reality. It's not enough to say that we must reform entitlements while, with the other hand, slapping "untouchable" stickers on the very items driving our debt.

And it's most certainly not enough to criticize a serious proposal without offering a serious alternative.

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Harold Meyerson, Washington Post:

Republicans have never particularly warmed to the American social contract that governed most of the past hundred years and assumed a level of collective national responsibility for the well-being of the elderly and children.

Republicans can't take sole credit for creating a vision of a diminished America. Those who applaud the macroeconomics of Ryan's cuts should at least be compelled to explain how ordinary Americans, whose incomes haven't risen since the late '90s, can take up the slack, in their own purchasing and in the nation's economic activity, created by these cuts.

There's talk that we have a president who's a Democrat -- the party that created the American social contract of the 20th century. Now that the Republicans want to repeal it all, he's nowhere to be found. Has anybody seen him? Does he still exist?

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David Brooks, New York Times:

It also creates the pivotal moment of truth for Obama. Will he come up with his own counterproposal, or will he simply demagogue the issue?

And what about the voters? Are they willing to face reality or will they continue to demand more government than they are willing to pay for?

Paul Ryan has grasped reality with both hands. He's forcing everybody else to do the same.

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E.J. Dionne, Washington Post:

And please, let's dispense with the idea that Ryan is courageous in offering his design. There is nothing courageous about asking for give-backs from the least advantaged. It takes no guts to demand a lot from groups that tend to vote against your party anyway.

And there is nothing daring about a conservative Republican delivering yet more benefits to the wealthiest people in our society, who privately finance campaigns to elect conservatives to Congress.

Ryan gives the game away by including the repeal of financial reform in his "budget" plan. What does this have to do with fiscal balance? Welcome to the Wall Street Protection Act of 2011.

And this budget has nothing to do with deficit reduction. Ryan would hack away at expenditures for the poor. He gets about two-thirds of his $4.3 trillion in actual cuts from programs for low-income Americans.

That almost exactly matches the $4.2 trillion he proposes in tax cuts over a decade. Welcome to the Bah Humbug Act of 2011.