April 07, 2011
My home town paper, the Chicago Tribune, wants us all to take House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget proposals very seriously. Remarkably the paper, which recently went through a leveraged buyout that puts ordinary tax scams to shame, tells readers to “trust us.”
Even if it weren’t for the stench of the paper’s leveraged buyout it would be hard to trust an editorial that never once mentions health care costs and uses the cheap trick of lumping Social Security in with Medicare and Medicaid as unaffordable “entitlements.” Of course everyone involved in the budget debate knows that the real story of the federal government’s long-term deficit problem is health care. If we paid the same amount for health care per person as other wealthy countries we would be looking at huge budget surpluses, not deficits.
Remarkably health care costs never get mentioned in the piece. According to the Congressional Budget Office, Ryan’s plan would actually increase what we pay for health care, giving tens of trillions of dollars over the coming decades to the health care industry. And, contrary to the Tribune’s assertion, it would likely put many elderly and sick into poverty by dismantling Medicare and Medicaid.
The editorial also neglected to mention the tax cuts that Representative Ryan wants to give the wealthy. Under current law, folks like Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein would be paying a marginal tax rate of 39.6 percent on income above $500,000. Instead, Mr. Ryan would have them pay a tax rate of just 25 percent. (He would also cut Goldman Sach’s corporate taxes as well.) This means that if Mr. Blankfein earned $20 million of income subject to the ordinary tax rate, Mr. Ryan would be giving him a tax break that is worth almost $3 million a year.
So, if you’re keeping score, Representative Ryan’s plan would give the wealthy hundreds of billions a year in tax cuts, it would give the health insurance industry and health care providers hundreds of billions of dollars of additional revenue each year, and it would deny tens of millions of retirees and sick people any guarantee of decent health care. And the Chicago Tribune tells us that this is “what real leaders do.”
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