https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/worst-ive-seen-far-budget-cuts-meet-poverty-heartland/
Congress and statehouses across the country are pushing budgets that would further cut assistance for poor people.
https://www.cbpp.org/blog/house-budget-committee-mistakes-were-made
This finding emerges from a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis of the Ryan plan. Table S-4 of the plan, as Chairman Ryan unveiled it on April 5, showed that the plan contains net program cuts of $4.3 trillion over ten years (2012-2022). [1] The table showed a $5.8 trillion cut in outlays from the Congressional Budget Office baseline — but $446 billion of that was interest savings and another $1.04 trillion was simply an assumption that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will phase down on the Obama Administration’s timetable. Actual program cuts produced net savings of $4.3 trillion.
Cuts in low-income programs appear likely to account for at least $2.9 trillion — or nearly two-thirds — of this total amount. The $2.9 trillion includes the following three categories of cuts:
- $2.17 trillion in reductions from Medicaid and related health care.
- $350 billion in cuts in mandatory programs serving low-income Americans (other than Medicaid).
- $400 billion in cuts in low-income discretionary programs.
- When faced with the choice of which specific programs to cut, policymakers are unlikely to cut much from a number of non-low-income programs in these budget categories that are popular, such as veterans’ disability compensation and the FBI. That means that other programs — including low-income programs — would have to be cut by more than their proportionate share.
The new budget from House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan proposes a series of dramatic tax cuts that would cost nearly $6 trillion in lost federal revenue over the next decade (see Figure 1), and that would provide the lion’s share of their benefits to high-income households and corporations. But, despite its stated promise to the contrary, the budget does not include a plausible way to pay for it all.
Estimates from the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center (TPC) show those tax cuts would cost the federal government nearly $6 trillion over the next decade, which exceeds the Ryan budget’s total spending cuts, exclusive of its interest savings. These tax cuts would provide extremely large new tax cuts to wealthy Americans, even as Chairman Ryan’s spending cuts would fall disproportionately on the most vulnerable individuals and families.
Chairman Ryan offers no proposals to offset the nearly $6 trillion in costs. He only links to a tax reform framework from House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, which mentions “scaling back tax preferences that distort economic behavior” but provides no details on how to do so.[2] The Ryan budget does not identify a single deduction, credit, exclusion, or other preference to narrow or close.
- Cutting the top corporate tax rate from 35 to 25 percent, at a cost of about $1.2 trillion.
- Chairman Ryan’s proposal to cut the top individual tax rate to 25 percent and repeal the AMT, at a cost of $3.8 trillion. (Chairman Ryan proposed cutting the top tax rate to 25 percent in his previous budget, but it would cost even more now because the American Taxpayer Relief Act (ATRA) enacted in January raised the top individual income-tax rate from 35 percent to 39.6 percent. Cutting the top rate from 39.6 percent to 25 percent, as the new Ryan budget proposes, would cost substantially more than cutting it from the old 35 percent to 25 percent.[5] )
- Repealing the revenue provisions in the ACA. As Chairman Ryan’s staff confirmed, the Ryan budget would repeal “all of [the ACA’s] tax increases.”[6] TPC was able to include in its estimate the cost of some of the ACA tax provisions, totaling $705 billion, but not all.[7] (CBO estimates indicate that the cost of repealing all of the ACA taxes, as Chairman Ryan proposes, would be about $1 trillion over ten years.[8]) The ACA’s revenue-raising measures are progressive, with some of its key provisions — such as its increase in Medicare payroll taxes for high-income households — focused on people on the upper rungs of the income ladder.
Mr. Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman and a possible White House contender in 2016, laid out a budget plan that cuts $5 trillion in spending over the next decade. He said it would bring federal spending and taxes into balance by 2024, through steep cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, and the total repeal of the Affordable Care Act just as millions are reaping the benefits of the law.
Defense spending would increase. Domestic programs would be reduced to the lowest levels since modern government accounting. And Medicare would be converted into a “premium support” system, where people 65 and older could buy private insurance with federal subsidies instead of government-paid health care.
“We need to be a proposition party, not just an opposition party,” said Mr. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin. “We believe we owe it to the country to offer an alternative to the status quo. It’s just that simple.”
Even with those tough political choices, the budget would balance in 2024 only because Mr. Ryan is assuming his cuts would prompt a burst of economic growth to raise tax revenues above what independent economists forecast. He also does not adjust the government’s revenue ledger to reflect the cost of repealing the health care law’s tax increases and Medicare cuts, which could total $2 trillion.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/03/paul-ryan-budget-obamacare/317533/
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/how-the-ryan-budget-fails-our-economy-by-failing-economics/
https://www.epi.org/blog/paul-ryan-failed-to-pass-a-republican-budget-resolution-but-thats-good-news/: Budget Cuts Meet Poverty in the HeartlandAll of these problems have been amplified by the fiscal austerity measures which have been in place since the Republicans hijacked the debt ceiling negotiations in the summer of 2011 to demand steep spending cuts. The House GOP budget resolution that passed out of committee would double down on such severe cuts, and yet it couldn’t even get a majority in a Republican-controlled House because it doesn’t call for large enough cuts. Or, to put it just as accurately, it failed because too many in the Republican caucus decided that it wouldn’t do quite enough damage to the economy.