(MintPress)–Last Sunday on Fox News Sunday, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) outlined his plan to balance the federal budget in 10 years — a radical improvement on the 25 years he offered during his 2012 run for the vice presidency. “By repealing Obamacare, and the Medicaid expansions which haven’t occurred yet, we are basically preventing an explosion of a program that is already failing,” Ryan said on the television program.
Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace was taken aback by the audacity of this, as was most of the viewing audience.
The Ryan budget — introduced on Tuesday — assumes the repeal of the Affordable Care Act by 2017. Most members of Ryan’s own party recognizes this prospect to be extremely unlikely. A repeal before 2017 would almost assuredly be vetoed by President Obama, assuming that the Republicans win control of the Senate in 2014 or 2016.
To make a run of repealing the bill in 2017, the Republicans must be able to keep their majority in the House of Representatives, win a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate (a gain of 15 seats) and take the White House. A recent poll from Quinnipiac University shows that the most-likely Democratic nominee for president in 2016, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.)would defeat the most-likely Republican candidate, Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.) 45 percent to 37 percent.
Ryan defends his position. “The other side will demagogue this issue. But remember: Anyone who attacks our Medicare proposal without offering a credible alternative is complicit in the program’s demise,” Ryan wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Ryan proved to be correct in guessing that the Democrats will not wait to attack his position.
Political gestures in the form of budgets
“The Ryan budget will be gift that gives throughout the 2014 cycle for Democrats,” Democratic pollster Geoff Garin said in a conference call with reporters on Monday.
“The fact that Paul Ryan’s budget envisions this really radical change of turning Medicare into a voucher program that passes all of the cost of health care inflation directly onto the backs of seniors puts them in a very vulnerable position,” Garin said. “The basic underlying philosophical premise of the Ryan budget is rejected by a voters in a way that shows up in this larger indictment of Republican policies in general.”
In a Feb. 26 Wall Street Journal poll, only 29 percent of all Americans agree with what the Republicans are doing in Congress, while 57 percent disagree.
“I would argue based on our experience of polling throughout the 2012 cycle that this sense of disagreement with the Republicans is born very much from a response to the Ryan budget itself and the set of policies that are encompassed in the Ryan budget,” Garin continued. “The Republican brand has become a drag on candidates who are tarnished with it, even in states that are reasonably red in their complexion.”
The Ryan budget — which embraces a $716 billion cut to Medicare’s administrative budget, which incorporates sequestration tax hikes (which most House Republicans voted against) and which ignores election-day polling that shows that the American people wants Medicare/Medicaid to be untouched — is positioned to be a political posture than an actual workable plan.
During the 2012 Republican Convention, Ryan spoke about the evils of the president’s proposed cut to Medicare — “You see, even with all the hidden taxes to pay for the health care takeover, even with new taxes on nearly a million small businesses, the planners in Washington still didn’t have enough money. They needed more. They needed hundreds of billions more. So they just took it all away from Medicare — $716 billion dollars, funneled out of Medicare by President Obama. An obligation we have to our parents and grandparents is being sacrificed, all to pay for a new entitlement we didn’t ask for. The greatest threat to Medicare is ObamaCare, and we’re going to stop it.”
A party redefined
A recent report by the Wall Street Journal has challenged the Republicans’ position that cuts to the government budget will promote growth. According to the Labor Department’s Household Survey, without cuts to government services, the unemployment rate for April would have been 7.1 percent and not the 8.1 percent that is currently forecasted. This is due to a steady decrease in government workers since December 2008.
Robert Reich, former secretary of labor under President Clinton and chancellor’s professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, argues that the Ryan budget is needlessly dangerous. “Austerity economics — of which Ryan’s upcoming budget is the most extreme version — is a cruel hoax. Cruel because it hurts most those who are already hurting; a hoax because it doesn’t work. The entire framework is based on the false analogy that the federal budget is akin to a family’s budget.”
“Families do have to balance their budgets,” Reich continued. “But that’s precisely why the federal government has to be the spender of last resort when consumer spending falls short of boosting the economy toward full employment.”
During an African-American outreach in Brooklyn on Monday, Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman Reince Priebus argued a newfound commitment toward winning the “hearts” of voters traditionally not sought by the Republicans. “We’ve got a marketing problem,” Priebus said. “A pretty big lesson, I think, for the party is that we can’t be totally obsessed with math and arithmetic — that we have to go for people’s hearts.”
Many now see the Ryan budget as antagonistic to the RNC’s agenda of getting away from the perspective that the Republicans do not care for the middle class.
“It’s very clear that voters sent a message last November — that they don’t want to end Medicare as we know it; they don’t want to slash education and job creation in order to fund more tax breaks for the wealthy — and yet the Republicans have failed to learn the single most important lesson,” Cecil argued. “No matter how good their polling gets, no matter how successful they think they are at recruiting candidates, no matter how improved their paid media is in 2014, the fact of the matter is, they continue to support policies that are out of touch with most Americans.”