May 06, 2016
Paul Krugman complains that the media have not exposed the inconsistencies in Paul Ryan’s budgets. While there is some truth to that (Ryan never identifies any of the loopholes he would close to cover the cost of lower tax rates), it is more serious that it never reports what Ryan actually proposes.
Ryan’s budgets, as analyzed by the Congressional Budget Office under his direction, call for eliminating the whole of the federal government by 2050, except for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and the military. This is implied by his reducing everything except Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid to 3.5 percent of GDP, roughly the current size of the military budget. That leaves zero for the Justice Department, the State Department, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Education Department, the National Park Service and everything else we think of as the federal government.
While Krugman is right in calling attention to proposals to pay for large tax cuts with the elimination of unnamed deductions, it seems more serious that Speaker Ryan is a person who wants to phase out the federal government. That is about as radical a position as you can find in D.C. and Ryan has repeated it many times. (He boasts how CBO scored his plan as eliminating the federal debt.)
Next to no one seems to know that Ryan is an abolitionist. It is difficult to see how someone espousing this view can be seen as a moderate conservative.
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