As Dana Milbank summarizes in today’s Washington Post, the proposed budget from Rep. Paul Ryan “would cut $770 billion over 10 years from Medicaid and other health programs for the poor, compared with President Obama’s budget. He takes an additional $205 billion from Medicare, $1.6 trillion from the Obama health-care legislation and $1.9 trillion from a category simply labeled “other mandatory.” Pressed to explain this magic asterisk, Ryan allowed that the bulk of those “other mandatory” cuts come from food stamps, welfare, federal employee pensions and support for farmers. Taken together, Ryan would cut spending on such programs by $5.3 trillion. . . .he would then give that money to America’s haves: some $4.3 trillion in tax cuts, compared with current policies, according to Citizens for Tax Justice.”
Ryan explained his approach at a speech at the American Enterprise Institute on Tuesday. The US is at an “insidious moral tipping point, and I think the president is accelerating this,” where too many Americans are receiving more from the government than they pay in taxes. He said that a generous safety net “lulls able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency, which drains them of their very will and incentive to make the most of their lives. It’s demeaning.” He expressed admiration for people who “pull themselves up by the bootstraps.”
Poverty is a damned difficult problem, but any public official who diagnoses the problem by saying that the poor don’t have incentives to work is an ignoramus.
It’s going to be interesting to see if this proposal is embraced by Mitt “I Don’t Care About the Very Poor” Romney.
In the meantime, here are some stats that Steve Rattner discussed on Morning Joe last week. The first shows the percentage of added wealth–new income, increased wealth–went to the Top 1%:
1994-2000 45%
2001-2002 57%
2003-2007 65%
2008-2009 49%
2010 93%
And of that 93%, 37% of it went to the top .01%–approximately 15,000 households.
Rattner broke these numbers down further. In 2010, the bottom 99% had an average income of $41,777, and got a 2% increase in income, worth $80. The Top 1% had an average income of $1,019,089, and got an 11.6% raise, worth $105,637. The top .01% had an average income of $23,846,950, and received an increase of 21.5%, worth $4,215,743. Now that’s how to lift yourself up by your boot straps!
And Ryan wants to give these people a tax cut, and pay for it on the backs of the shiftless, lazy, complacent poor.
As bizarre as it feels, I am in total agreement with Ryan on one point: that the U.S. is at an “insidious moral tipping point.” We just kinda veer off in totally different directions from there. Ryan seems to believe that the only way to deal with a moral tipping point is to jump right off that cliff to hell. He can go there without me.