Paul Ryan Whitesplains It All To You

Mclesh said:

I am sick of the poor being demonized. How about we end corporate welfare and use the money for job training/creation?

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WASHINGTON — The unveiling Tuesday of Representative Paul D. Ryan’s newest Republican budget may have redrawn the battle lines for the 2014 election, detailing what his party could do with complete control of Congress and allowing Democrats to broaden the political terrain beyond health care and the narrower issues of the minimum wage and unemployment benefits.

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.

The new budget violates some tenets that both parties have tried to observe since the budget fights of 2011 and 2012. Those fights preserved a practice of cutting defense and nondefense programs almost equally while sparing the poorest Americans from the worst of the belt-tightening.

Mr. Ryan’s plan does not strike that balance.

In his plan, military spending through 2024 would actually rise by $483 billion over the spending caps established in the 2011 Budget Control Act “consistent with America’s military goals and strategies,” while nondefense spending at Congress’s annual discretion would be cut by $791 billion below those strict limits.

In all, Mr. Ryan said, spending would be cut by $5.1 trillion over the next decade. More than $2 trillion of that would come from repealing Mr. Obama’s health care initiative, the Affordable Care Act, a political move that has become much more difficult with the closing of the first enrollment period. More than 10 million Americans have gotten health insurance through the law, either through private policies purchased on insurance exchanges, through expanded Medicaid or private policies purchased through brokers but subsidized by the law.

As with past budget proposals, Mr. Ryan seeks to eliminate the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, a $792 billion retrenchment, then turn the health care program for the poor into block grants to the states — saving an additional $732 billion over the decade. He would turn food stamps into a block grant program and cap spending, starting in 2020, cutting that program by $125 billion in five years. The budget relies on imposing new work requirements on food stamp and welfare recipients.

Such an approach “empowers recipients to get off the aid rolls and back on the payrolls,” Mr. Ryan wrote.

But the toughest cuts would come from domestic programs that have already been reduced steadily since 2011, when Republicans took control of the House. Mr. Ryan’s 2024 domestic spending figure would be lower in nominal dollars than such spending was in 2005. Adjusted for inflation, it would be a 29 percent cut from today’s levels, and 28 percent below the average level of spending in former President George W. Bush’s administration.

Nor did Mr. Ryan shy away from hot-button issues. Education funding would be cut by $145 billion over 10 years. Pell grants for college students would lose $90 billion. University students would start being charged interest on their loans while still in school, reaping $40 billion.

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