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Ryan plan widens US income gap

By Staff | Apr 21, 2012

In a meeting with the Concord Monitor editorial board this month, 2nd District congressman Charlie Bass defended his vote for the controversial budget crafted by Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan.

Bass said the Ryan budget wasn’t his first choice. He preferred a bipartisan plan that contained some revenue increases, but national anti-tax groups hammered the plan, and it received just 38 votes.

That same week, Sen. Kelly Ayotte came to Concord to voice her support for the Ryan budget and its proposal to means-test Medicare and raise the age of eligibility for the program. The plan also would allow seniors to opt out of Medicare in favor of government vouchers that could be used to purchase private insurance.

First District Rep. Frank Guinta is a member of Ryan’s budget committee and part of the majority that approved the plan by a 19-18 vote. He describes the Ryan budget as a blueprint for his party’s federal budget negotiations.

The Ryan budget is a radical plan that, at a time of increasing economic inequality, gives massive tax cuts to corporations and the wealthy and pays for them by drastically reducing programs that serve primarily the poor and the middle class. It is, nonetheless, the plan that won the support of every Republican member of New Hampshire’s congressional delegation.

Bass said he voted for the Ryan budget in order to have something on the table as a starting point for negotiations. But no plan that addresses the nation’s $14 trillion deficit only on the spending side, as the Ryan plan does, deserves to be treated seriously.

The deficit is a serious and growing problem. Ryan’s plan worsens it on the revenue side by extending the George W. Bush tax cuts, at an estimated cost of $5.4 trillion over a decade, and adds trillions more in new tax cuts. It makes up for those losses and more by cutting spending on social programs and ultimately by shrinking or eliminating funding for almost everything else government does.

Ryan’s budget would shrink spending on food stamps and Medicaid and block grant those programs to states, which would either have to raise taxes to maintain benefit levels or reduce benefits and raise eligibility levels. It reduces Pell grants that make higher education more affordable and nutrition programs for poor women and children.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that Medicaid spending would shrink by 45 percent over the next decade under the Ryan budget. Spending on health care for the poor would essentially be cut in half.

The Ryan plan assumes no cuts in defense spending, despite the winding down of two costly wars. Stick to the Ryan budget, the CBO says, and the nation would have no money to spend on anything but defense, Social Security and health care. The government would have no money to invest in the very things the nation needs to prosper: a rebuilt infrastructure, vastly improved education system, and investment in research and development.

Despite the protestations of anti-tax zealots – protests that have become platform for Republicans – Americans pay less in taxes than residents of all but two of the 34 nations in the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation: Mexico and Chile.

All but the very poorest Americans can afford to pay more for the services and the nation they demand. That nation is not one moving even further in the direction of have-nots and have-mores.

The Ryan budget is a starting point. So is the edge of a cliff.

– Concord Monitor

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