When uteruses are outlawed, only outlaws will have uteruses.
If you look carefully, his numbers also assume his budget plan will bring employment below the Full Employment amount. Which is kinda impossible.
Mr. Ryan has this reputation for being good at numbers. I’m not sure why.
Say, did you drop this “un”? Found it lying on the floor next to your post…
The un might be useful, yes.
CBO analysis.
… so, yeah, increased public debt compared to doing nothing, richest Americans make out like bandits, increased load on the elderly.
But who’s surprised?
Republicans have been pissed about the New Deal prgrams for a generation. they see this budget crisis as an opportunity to make things like they were before 1933.
Tax cuts for the rich, bust up the unions, abolish Medicaid and Medicare, increase the deficit, all the while denying that it was GOP policies that got us here.
Tell the lie long and lud enough, it becomes the truth.
sigh.
That can’t be right.
Perhaps if we cut taxes even more…
2.8% unemployment rate.
So I guess the assumption is that we’ll be fighting a world war sometime around 2020.
Probably, if the Republicans take the presidency around then…
His reputation is relative to other Republicans.
Like I said, I appplaud him for addressing medicare/medicaid. I would do it differently but we need to wake up to the fact taht we cannot continue to proivide current benefits forever and perhaps letting the free market deliver the bad news is easier than getting politicians to do it. I also applaud his cutting ethanol subsidies and military spending BUT the tax cuts seem not only unnecessary but counterproductive.
There’s nothing courageous about it. It’s pure deficit cynicism, and it won’t do anything to address rising healthcare costs, it will simply offload them onto the elderly, who in no way have enough bargaining power as individuals to get a fair deal from the private healthcare industry.
We recognized that reality a long time ago. It’s why we have Medicare in the first place.
The author of the Heritage Foundations report that Ryan used to bolster his budget has now said that his numbers might be a “tad” off.
And of course it’s the CBO’s fault.
They got the 2.8% unemployment figures from their economic model:
http://www.slate.com/BLOGS/blogs/weigel/archive/2011/04/06/how-did-the-heritage-foundation-get-that-2-8-percent-unemployment-number.aspx
To me, this is a reason to distrust the model, an iffy thing to start out with. And if it gives you bizarre numbers for unemployment, how much can you trust its other results?
That explains a lot.
Clearly new markets in Pixie Dust Weight Loss Pills and Unicorn Horn Aphrodisiacs will be responsible for the boom.
-Joe
What do you mean deficit cynicism?
As far as I can tell, there is NO WAY we can continue to pay our current benefits. We have to come to grips with the fact that while we must provide health care to every American there is a limit to how much we can provide. We can no longer provide serial intensive care to people who are so old that they haven’t had a lucid thought in years (if we ever could). People can decide to buy more health care for themselves if they want but they can no longer expect us to bear the costs come hell or high water.
Sure we can try to bend the curve (good luck with that) but for now we MUST bend the curve of the cost of health care to the government and perhaps that will get people to think about bending the curve of costs generally.
When you assume such a robust stimulative effect from reducing taxes you end up with ridiculous results. The heritage foundation can only justify their policies by assuming lies.
I remember being in a conference with one of these guys arguing that privatizing social security would be better for everyone especially the poor because the poor have shorter lifespans than the wealthy. Of course he didn’t mention that this assumed something like an 11% return on investment on privatized social security accounts versus the much more modest growth you get from treasuries.
The point he was trying to make was valid in that the poor reap less than you might think because they die early but he neglected to mention that there are survivor benefits and that you needed to assume 11% in your models to get the glowing results he was offering.
I think its illegal to dehorn unicorns to prevent unicorns from being hunted for their horns. They passed that law alongside the law prohibiting judges in Oklahoma from using sharia law to reach their decisions to prevent the takeover of Oklahoma’s justice system by muslim imams.
The current benefits are unsustainable because the cost of healthcare vastly outpaces inflation.
Ryan’s plan would give seniors vouchers whose value doesn’t rise with healthcare costs. Somehow, the hard constraint of the voucher is supposed to prevent hospitals and HMOs from gouging patients for the costs of necessary care. At the exact moment that the healthcare industry has someone by the balls, you expect them to only charge up to the amount of the government voucher, and not totally clean them out.
Have you been paying attention to corporate behavior for the last 30 years?
Is it just me, or does this essentially mean “no matter what you input, it outputs the same thing ! That’s the beauty of it !” ?
But see - this time the healthcare executives will make sure the cost doesn’t outpace the benefits. Just like this time tax cuts for the rich will create jobs.
I’m beginning to feel like Rocket J Squirrel.
“Hey Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit out of this hat.”