Tea Party Vs YOU

From Reuters:

With Medicare at the top of lawmakers' fall agenda, Tea Party movement leaders hope to ignite support for Republican plans to transform the popular federal healthcare program for the elderly.

Thousands of Tea Party movement activists are expected to descend this month on town hall meetings across key battleground states as part of an intensifying campaign ahead of the 2012 presidential and congressional elections.

Their priority is a plan to slash Medicare costs proposed by House of Representatives Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, which could gain momentum now that a debt-limit deal between President Barack Obama and Congress has made potential Medicare cuts a centerpiece of the deficit debate.

And what's that plan again? It's:

The Ryan plan -- which the House approved in April but which went nowhere in the Democratic-led Senate -- would preserve Medicare for current beneficiaries but transform it for future retirees from a system that provides guaranteed benefits to one that gives the elderly financial assistance to buy private insurance.

Enough of a change that we get to say this would "end Medicare as we know it." So instead of medicare funds going to doctors and/or hospitals for elderly care, note that it goes to insurance companies.

This from our friends at Freedomworks, an astroturf organization funded in part by, of course, our good friend Richard Mellon Scaife (more than $3 million over the past few decades).

So I am sure we can expect to see more than a few editorials from Scaife's braintrust at the Tribune-Review touting the benefits of Freedomworks and the Ryan plan to eradicate Medicare.

It's just that simple.

Scenes From The (New) GOP

First there's the House Budget guy:

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), a leading advocate of shrinking entitlement spending and the architect of the plan to privatize Medicare, spent Wednesday evening sipping $350 wine with two like-minded conservative economists at the swanky Capitol Hill eatery Bistro Bis.

More on Ryan from TPM:

Susan Feinberg, an associate business professor at Rutgers, was at Bistro Bis celebrating her birthday with her husband that night. When she saw the label on the bottle of Jayer-Gilles 2004 Echezeaux Grand Cru Ryan's table had ordered, she quickly looked it up on the wine list and saw that it sold for an eye-popping $350, the most expensive wine in the house along with one other with the same pricetag.

Feinberg, an economist by training, was even more appalled when the table ordered a second bottle. She quickly did the math and figured out that the $700 in wine the trio consumed over the course of 90 minutes amounted to more than the entire weekly income of a couple making minimum wage.

"We were just stunned," said Feinberg, who e-mailed TPM about her encounter later the same evening. "I was an economist so I started doing the envelope calculations and quickly figured out that those two bottles of wine was more than two-income working family making minimum wage earned in a week."

The Federal Minimum Wage is $7.25/hour. Assuming a 40-hour workweek and two minimum wage earners, that's $580 before taxes.

But of course the Tea Party wing of the GOP wants to look at eliminating the minimum wage:

Republican Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann has soft-pedaled her opposition to the minimum wage law considerably since 2005, when she was quoted as saying, at a Minnesota State Senate hearing, “Literally, if we took away the minimum wage—if conceivably it was gone—we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level.” Appearing on CBS’s (CBS) Face the Nation on June 26, Bachmann would say only that eliminating the minimum wage is “something that obviously Congress would have to look at” as a solution to high unemployment.

And then there's Senator Orrin Hatch who thinks the poor aren't doing enough to help out:

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) voted against beginning debate on a measure that would have the Senate declare the rich should share the pain of debt reduction Thursday, a day after arguing that it's the poor and middle class who need to do more.

"I hear how they're so caring for the poor and so forth," Hatch said in remarks on the Senate floor Wednesday, in reference to Democrats. "The poor need jobs! And they also need to share some of the responsibility."

Hatch's comments were aimed at a motion that passed 74 to 22 to start debating a non-binding resolution that says millionaires and billionaires should play a more meaningful role in reducing the nation's debt.

The point of all this?

Just to let you all know that this is the GOP these days. To all my Republican friends (and relatives), I'd like to ask a question: Do you really want to be associated with such mean spirited greed?

And we're not even talking about choice or marriage equality.

Senator Toomey Votes To Phase Out Medicare

From Talking Points Memo:

The GOP continued its bloody walk into the Medicare buzzsaw Wednesday, when 40 out of 47 Senate Republicans voted in support of the House GOP budget, and its plan to phase out and privatize the popular entitlement program.

The test vote failed by a vote of 57-40. But the roll call illustrates that Medicare privatization -- along with deep cuts to Medicaid and other social services -- remains the consensus position of the GOP despite the growing political backlash against them.

Here's the roll in case you don't believe me.

Ezra Klein described how the phase out would occur:

To move us to surpluses, Ryan's budget proposes reforms that are nothing short of violent. Medicare is privatized. Seniors get a voucher to buy private insurance, and the voucher's growth is far slower than the expected growth of health-care costs.

With no guarantee, of course, that any insurance company will actually sell the senior with the voucher the insurance he or she was given the voucher to buy. Medicare is guaranteed. Hence the phase out.

And the backlash? We read this from the AP:

They're not buying it. Most Americans say they don't believe Medicare has to be cut to balance the federal budget, and ditto for Social Security, a new poll shows.

The Associated Press-GfK poll suggests that arguments for overhauling the massive benefit programs to pare government debt have failed to sway the public. The debate is unlikely to be resolved before next year's elections for president and Congress.

Americans worry about the future of the retirement safety net, the poll found, and 3 out of 5 say the two programs are vital to their basic financial security as they age. That helps explain why the Republican Medicare privatization plan flopped, and why President Barack Obama's Medicare cuts to finance his health care law contributed to Democrats losing control of the House in last year's elections.

TPM added:

To shelter GOP dissidents from the vote to privatize Medicare, but also to shore up their bona fides on the right, the Senate also held a test vote on a similarly austere alternative budget authored by Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA).

But the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities points out:

At first blush, the Toomey plan may seem more moderate than the Ryan budget, which the Senate also will likely consider this week. That’s because the Toomey plan does not include Chairman Ryan’s controversial proposal to replace guaranteed Medicare benefits with vouchers that would cover part of the cost of purchasing private health insurance — a provision that would raise total health care spending attributable to Medicare beneficiaries and more than double out-of-pocket costs for a typical 65-year-old beneficiary in 2022. (Neither plan proposes savings in Social Security.)

But, in several ways, the Toomey budget is more radical than the Ryan plan. While it essentially mirrors the Ryan plan in proposing deep cuts in nondefense discretionary programs, it proposes much deeper cuts in entitlement programs other than Medicare — and relies on a rosy economic scenario and fanciful assumptions about tax collections — to claim it produces modest surpluses in 2020 and 2021 instead of the approximately $400 billion deficits in each of those years under the Ryan plan.

Meanwhile, the CBPP has something interesting to say about the deficit:

Some lawmakers, pundits, and others continue to say that President George W. Bush’s policies did not drive the projected federal deficits of the coming decade — that, instead, it was the policies of President Obama and Congress in 2009 and 2010. But, the fact remains: the economic downturn, President Bush’s tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq explain virtually the entire deficit over the next ten years (see Figure 1).

Here's Figure 1:

They add:

The events and policies that pushed deficits to these high levels in the near term were, for the most part, not of President Obama’s making. If not for the Bush tax cuts, the deficit-financed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the effects of the worst recession since the Great Depression (including the cost of policymakers’ actions to combat it), we would not be facing these huge deficits in the near term. By themselves, in fact, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will account for almost half of the $20 trillion in debt that, under current policies, the nation will owe by 2019. The stimulus law and financial rescues will account for less than 10 percent of the debt at that time.

So dealing with the deficit by phasing out Medicare (or cutting other entitlements) makes perfect sense to Pat Toomey and those other 39 Republican Senators. Let's make sure those millionaires and billionaires keep their Bush Era tax cuts! That'll solve this budget problem (the one that Bush caused) for sure!

The Tribune-Review Cheers For The Ryan Budget

I wanted to post on this stuff yesterday but other things (doncha know) got in the way. (Hey, that's dactylic!)

Now here's something that no one would have suspected. No one. Never. Nope.

The Editorial Board of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review likes Congressman Ryan's budget:

A monumental moment occurred in the city of monuments Tuesday as Republicans battled to fix the fiscal 2011 budget mess inherited from Democrats (who, conveniently, forget that they put last November's election ahead of their fiduciary responsibility).

House Republicans, led by the plain-speaking Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, introduced a fiscal 2012 budget that pulls no punches and minces no numbers in finally getting serious about addressing the federal government's fiscal mess.

It slashes trillions in spending over the next decade, including nearly half-a-trillion dollars through 2013. It boldly tackles Medicare (an even worse ticking time bomb than Social Security), phasing in a private-sector, market-based solution that's far more senior-friendly.

The Tribune-Review is in favor of abolishing Medicare - just so you know.

But that's not the big news here. Take a look. From the Huffingtonpost:

When Paul Ryan unveiled his budget today, he touted it as a "Path to Prosperity" and he and his colleagues kept saying it was "based in fact." In reality, Ryan's claims of prosperity are based on an analysis - written at his request by the conservative Heritage Foundation - that has more basis in magic than economics. [emphasis added.]

Now, who would have guessed that Scaife's braintrust would be cheering about a budget that's based on an analysis by the Scaife funded Heritage Foundation?

But even that's not the big news. What's the big news, you ask?

From the National Journal:

The Republican budget’s economic projections are rosy, including growth rates of over 3 percent for the next three years. An analysis performed by the conservative Heritage Foundation at Ryan’s request found the unemployment rate would be reduced to 4 percent in 2015 by Ryan’s budget, an incredibly low number when many economists believe the economy will not return to so-called “full employment” of about 5 percent until years after that.

As Matt Yglesias points out:

It’s worth noting that this is not just unrealistic, it’s impossible. When unemployment drops beneath 5 percent, the Federal Reserve starts raising interest rates until a recession pushes it back up. This is deemed necessary to prevent inflationary wage increases.

But even that's not the big news. The big news is that the Scaife-funded Heritage foundation got the numbers wrong and pulled them from the report. Krugman has the evidence, if you wanted to go see it.

Not a word about any of this from the braintrust, of course. They dutifully cheer what their boss has already paid for (flawed as it is).

The New GOP Budget - What WONDERFUL News For Us!!

The CBO has done an initial analysis of the latest GOP budget proposed by Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI).

First a caveat from the CBO:

CBO has not reviewed legislative language for the proposal, so this analysis does not represent a cost estimate for legislation that might implement the proposal. Rather, it is an assessment of the broad, long-term budgetary impacts of the proposal, with results spanning several decades and measured as a share of GDP

That being said, just guess what it found? Here we go:

Among other changes, the proposal would convert the current Medicare program to a system under which beneficiaries received premium support payments—payments that would be used to help pay the premiums for a private health insurance policy and would grow over time with overall consumer prices. The change would apply to people turning 65 beginning in 2022; beneficiaries who turn 65 before then would remain in the traditional Medicare program, with the option of converting to the new system. Additionally, the proposal would convert the matching payments that the federal government makes to states for Medicaid costs under current law into block grants of fixed dollar amounts beginning in 2013. Those amounts would grow over time with overall consumer prices and population growth. Further, the proposal would repeal the key provisions of the major 2010 health care legislation that deal with insurance coverage and certain other provisions. Under the proposal, mandatory spending for health care would be about 6 percent of GDP in 2030 and 2040 and about 5 percent in 2050, CBO estimates.

See that first part? That's the GOP doing away with Medicare. If you turn 65 in 2022 (or anytime thereafter) you'll get a voucher to help you pay for your private health insurance. If you can't afford the costs above that, tough nuggies.

TPM has more:

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office's initial analysis of the House GOP budget released today by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is filled with nuggets of bad news for Republicans.

In addition to acknowledging that seniors, disabled and elderly people would be hit with much higher out-of-pocket health care costs, the CBO finds that by the end of the 10-year budget window, public debt will actually be higher than it would be if the GOP just did nothing.

Under the so-called "extended baseline scenario" -- a.k.a. projections based on current law -- debt held by the public will grow to 67 percent of GDP by 2022. Under the GOP plan, public debt would reach 70 percent of GDP in the same window.

And:

If the current Medicare system were allowed to continue, CBO found that an average 65-year-old beneficiary's costs would be only 25 percent of what it'd be in the individual private insurance market. Under the GOP plan, those costs would jump to 68 percent.

Many thanks to our many friends in the GOP. I am sure they're all wonderful people just as I am sure they are members of a political party that's just proposed this cruel "let's erase Medicare to save it" budget.