Joe Conason: Ryan’s Plan Neither Serious Nor Courageous

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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/ryans_plan_neither_serious_nor_courageous_20110408/

Ryan’s Plan Neither Serious Nor Courageous
Posted on Apr 8, 2011
By Joe Conason

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For a budget to be serious, it would also have to finance basic national needs that must be met for us to remain economically competitive. At a minimum, those include massive repairs and rebuilding of the crumbling infrastructure—from roads, bridges, ports, and airports to the communications and electrical grids—as well as education and the environment.

But the Ryan plan envisions devastating reductions in infrastructure, education and environmental spending, with cuts as high as 70 percent. Robert Greenstein, of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities—a respected expert who would never dream of fraudulently projecting 2.8 percent unemployment—says that Ryan’s budget would ultimately defund all government functions except for defense (and drastically diminished Medicare and Social Security payments). In what sense is that a serious or responsible plan?

So the Ryan plan isn’t really serious, but is it courageous and uplifting? Only if slashing services for low-income Americans and denying Medicare to tens of millions of older people is somehow brave and inspirational—and only if courage is defined by doling out still more tax cuts to the country’s wealthiest families (like the construction magnates in the Ryan family).

Greenstein calculates that at least two-thirds of the cuts proposed by Ryan would have to come from programs for people with low and moderate incomes, including food stamps, Pell grants, housing and Medicaid. Meanwhile, he would literally ask nothing from the rich or corporate special interests, except perhaps to cash their enormous tax refund checks with a smile. Moreover, he would exempt one group from his scheme to abolish Medicare, which just happens to be the voters now over 55 years old who are the most reliable Republicans.

What might be truly courageous for a Republican politician, of course, would be to urge sacrifice from his party’s rich contributors as well as from the poor and the middle class. That would be the start of serious budgeting, too.