House Passes Ryan Debt Reduction Budget Plan

Just one day after Congress concluded its fight over this year’s spending, the House voted 235 to 193 to approve the fiscal blueprint for 2012 drafted by Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin and chairman of the Budget Committee. Besides reconfiguring the Medicare program that now serves those 65 and older, the proposal would cut the top corporate and personal income tax rates while also overhauling the Medicaid health program for the poor.

The vote represents the most ambitious effort yet by the new Republican majority in the House to demonstrate that it intends to aggressively rein in spending and shrink government. It doubles as a challenge to President Obama over which party is more determined to force a sharp shift in the handling of federal dollars.

“The spending spree is over,” Mr. Ryan said. “We cannot keep spending money we don’t have.”

The New York Times

The Ryan plan is far from perfect, but it’s pretty much the only thing anyone has put there at this point.  What I don’t like about it is that it reforms the nanny state entitlements rather than gradually weening the country off of them altogether.  Despite that, of course, the Democrats have seized the opportunity to claim that it does exactly that.  The caterwauling has already begun that Congressman So & So has voted to kill grandma and make poor people take the burden off of the wealthy, none of which is true.  It would really be nice if the two sides could just be honest with the public and stop denigrating each other with hyperbole and slander.  Maybe then they could work together to actually solve this problem.

A Congressional Budget Office review of the Ryan proposal predicted that retirees would pay more for their health care under it than they would under traditional Medicare. The agency also said the Ryan plan to convert federal Medicaid spending into block grants for states would most likely end up reducing benefits for those enrolled in the program.

Well hey, those are the breaks.  What part of “we have no money left” do people opposed to entitlement reform not understand?  People under 55 have time to prepare for these changes and it’s either that or Medicare eventually really is destroyed when the nation collapses under too much debt, like Greece already has.

Aside from protecting entitlements, the other main issue I have with the Ryan plan is that it does not balance the budget for another 26 years.  This is, of course, completely unrealistic because it’s predicated upon the idea that once it’s past neither the current nor future Congresses or presidential administrations will alter it.  That is a pipe dream.

Now, this plan has absolutely zero chance of passing the Senate so this is not what is going to eventually become law.  There are competing plans out there from Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA), a bipartisan plan from Senators Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) and Mark Warner (D-VA), and a Marxist plan from the Congressional Progressive Caucus known as the People’s Budget, which I imagine is as much of the “people’s” as the People’s Republic of China is.

Every Democrat in the House voted against the Ryan plan and every Republican voted for it with the exception of four, including North Carolina Congressman Walter Jones, whose office did not release a comment regarding his decision to not support it.

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