The Party of Small Government
I’ve got a piece up at Newsweek looking at how Paul Ryan’s deficit-killing Roadmap For America might cause problems for the GOP.
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I’ve got a piece up at Newsweek looking at how Paul Ryan’s deficit-killing Roadmap For America might cause problems for the GOP.
Commenting is closed for this article.
As far as I have been able to determine by his voting record, Paul Ryan was OK with big deficits until Obama was elected (If I have this wrong, please let me know). That suggests that the purpose of his budget plan is to improve his political fortunes by upping his national media profile.
— cw · Mar 3, 03:48 PM · #
CW,
Ryan drew up the first iteration of his Roadmap — which was arguably tougher and more extreme — during Bush’s presidency. It got a lot less attention then.
— Peter Suderman · Mar 3, 06:18 PM · #
What does it mean when a legislature draws up a proposal to reduce deficits but votes to increase them?
— cw · Mar 3, 06:43 PM · #
Ryan’s proposal doesn’t balance the budget, those claims are based on an assumed level of revenue of about 19.5% of GDP with no examination of whether his tax policies would actually achieve that. That’s what passes for a serious proposal?
— LarryinLA · Mar 3, 06:58 PM · #
I meant to write “legislator.”
— cw · Mar 3, 07:01 PM · #
Larry,
The problem is that they haven’t sorted out which government agency could give an estimate on that. CBO doesn’t score tax revenues, and JCT declined to score the plan because it doesn’t have the modeling capability. So they worked it out with what assistance and advice they could get. It’s not for a lack of trying that they haven’t gotten an independent score on the revenue side.
— Peter Suderman · Mar 3, 08:14 PM · #
The CBO does revenue projections all the time. There’s plenty of revenue scored in, for example, the various health care bills. The CBO scored the Bush tax cuts. This seems like nonsense to me. Maybe there’s something very different about Ryan’s tax proposals that the CBO can’t do, but given the GOPs ‘tax cuts pay for themselves’ nonsense, let’s just say I’m pretty skeptical when this so-called budget balancing proposal somehow omits an independant estimate of the revenue side.
— LarryinLA · Mar 4, 12:35 AM · #
BTW, I do appreciate the reply, and I’m open to changing my mind if there’s some evidence for your contention that the CBO couldn’t score the revenue side. I’m no expert on CBO policy or budget models, so I could be wrong, but I’m going to need more than your say-so to conclude as such.
— LarryinLA · Mar 4, 07:35 PM · #