Party of NO (and Zero) Try Again, Show True Colors in "Fudge-It"

Original Link: http://www.bluecommonwealth.com/diary/7/my-two-cents-party-of-no-and-zero-try-again-show-true-colors-in-fudgeit

by: KathyinBlacksburg

Teddy wrote about this subject in her post here at BC. As you'd expect, I have some observations as well. You'd think the hapless House Republicans would have learned from the mockery hurled their way just one week ago over their non-numbers "fudge-it," (as Keith Olbermann called it). Here's the original 18-page GOP rendering from last week. But they didn't learn. So, the GOP presented it's April Fools Day 63-page "budget" with a few charts at the end, no real budget there. Read it here. Once again the GOP "budget proposal" isn't a budget proposal, but rather propaganda, ripe with rigged numbers, false claims, scare-mongering, and all the signs of disaster capitalism (which isn't real capitalism at all). Aside from placebo effects garnered when Norquist-clones pat each other on the back, and dream their dreams of drowning America's agenda in a bathtub, there's nothing here for America. This fudge-it is brought to you by the people who created the economic collapse. Here in a nutshell is what it says, between the lines:
KathyinBlacksburg :: My two Cents: Party of NO (and Zero) Try Again, Show True Colors in "Fudge-It"

•Cut taxes in historic proportions (primarily for the rich).
•Reduce top marginal tax rate from 35% to 25%.
•Reduce corporate taxes to 25% (not that most of the big corporations pay any.) That cut is three times that given to the rich by George W. Bush.
•Completely eliminate the capital gains tax, again favoring the wealthy.
•End the estate tax (because the threshold for estate tax has risen over the years, only a very small minority of Americans are subject to it.) Currently, only 2% of Americans are subject to estate tax., according to the Brookings Institution here. As Brookings pointed out back in 1997, estates have long been able to make unlimited transfers to spouses and charities. Additionally, an individual has a 2 million dollar exemption to estate tax (Couples twice that.) Few farms in America are subject to estate tax either. Here's what David Cay Johnson had to say about the farm tax myth. Overwhelmingly, those are exempt too.
•Keep tax favoritism for oil and gas companies (and off course, off-shore drilling off the east coast).
•End any economic stimulus. Let the chips fall where they may.
•Forbid nationalizing of failed banks, not even when some should be "nationalized." This has been standard practice since the Great Depression. That's essentially what happens when the Resolution Trust Company moves in to salvage a bank. But the party of NO says NO!
•Close Medicare off for those younger than 55. Start a separate Medicare program for those 54 and younger. This is a classic de-funding, privatizing gimmick, as I'll show below.
•Create no jobs. The authors claim they would, but eight years have taught us what more and more tax cuts do--and it's not create jobs.
The so-called budget contains cooked numbers (p. 33), such as the lie that the Social Security Trust Fund will be "exhausted by 2041." Indeed, if no changes are made, it would be able to satisfy 75% of its obligations. Or this whopper where the Republicans just extended some lines. In the real world (see chart), the CBO numbers are only extended to 2019. So the GOP just made stuff up.:

The budget" contains gems such as "spending-is-the-problem" clichés, something that didn't matter to Ronald Reagan, who to that point had the biggest government in US history. It didn't matter to George W. Bush, who inherited a surplus, but drove up the deficit and spent and deregulated us into this economic chaos.

Using the "Budget" to Medi-scare and Then Gut (Phase Out) Medicare
One of the most despicable things about this so-called budget is its thinly disguised opportunism. It uses the economic crisis to savage Medicare. The GOP wasn't April-Fools-joking about shafting Medicare. Here's the "short of it":

•The document complains of out-of-control Medicare costs, but says nothing about ending subsidies (in the form of excess payments) to insurance companies to lure people away from traditional Medicare.
•The new GOP "budget proposal" is full of unsupported, frightening claims (Medicare will take the entire budget one day.)
•It falsely conflates universal access to insurance with nationalized delivery of health care.
•Borrowing lines from the old "Harry and Louise" ads, the GOP proposal lies to Americans about freedom of choice for doctors. (BTW, the actors who played "Harry and Louis" now repent and support universal health care).
•It even tries to run the now-legendary scare about someone in England who supposedly couldn't get treatment. Of course, no one in current-day America has such stories, they'd have us believe. It's budget by single case story-telling.
•The GOP throws in the charge that "government run" health care is a death sentence. Of course, no one is talking about government run health CARE for America. We are talking about insurance, not care delivery.But who's quibbling with details?
•It phases-out and privatizes Medicare by creating a privatized Medicare for those currently 54 and under, by giving premium subsidies to them.
•It ignores that Medicare has lower overhead than private insurance.
•It offers (gee, thanks) those currently under 55 a "premiums subsidy" for privatized Medicare. You know, so older Americans can find insurance they can afford on the open market!? As if.
•The GOP wants to "allow us to shop across state lines," where we won't be protected by the insurance laws of our own home state.

Exploiting the Economic Crisis and Lying to Americans in Order to Destroy Social Security.

Perhaps the most malicious and pernicious sleight of hand is treating Social Security as if it's a regular budget item. Funded separately by both employees and their employers, it does not get its funding from general funds. That would only be necessary after 2041, and only if nothing is done to fine tune the program in the meantime. One single change, making all earned income subject to Social Security tax, would solve the problem. But the Party of No says Not!

Then the GOP "Budget Alternative" conflates Medicare and Social Security problems. When lumping "entitlements" (even that word has PR connotations) together, the GOP conflates the two programs to mislead Americans into thinking they are intertwined and both in crisis. Medicare is in crisis. Social Security's problems are fixable without draconian measures. In addition, the two programs are separately funded. However, thanks to reckless GOP policies, such as no competitive bidding, excessive reimbursements for private insurers, and the GOP's refusal to fund studies of what treatments works and what don't, actually cause it to exceed revenue and become a general fund issue.

Now proposed in the longer version by by the Party of No is the following hit to Social Security:

•22% across-the-board cuts to Social Security
•Means testing (they call it "small changes in the way benefits are calculated for higher income workers"), Unless I missed it in the Fudge-it, they don't say what "high income" is.
•Gradual Privatization by "offering" people "choices." (Choices in GOP speak means more ways they can nail us to the wall, gamble with our retirements, and generally drown every last program that helps people.

I may be having a bad dream here, but I think I see the Peterson Institutes' hand in all this BS. The document uses phrases like "Social Security is one critical, if unfinished, piece of retirement security" for seniors. Yeh, it's unfinished, so the GOP'll finish it off while pretending to "save" it.

The GOP has aired its budget talking points everywhere, before Congress, on television, on radio (including NPR), and in print almost daily in newspapers such as the Washington Post. The words glide off the tongues of talking heads as glibly as you can say , "they've got theirs." And " To hell with the rest (of Americans)." The GOP is trying mightily to use any opportunity to gut what little is left of the New Deal and Great Society. If it serves people, it's bad. If it builds weapons, it's good. That's all folks, brought to you by the GOP. Did I mention that the Project for a New American Century, which brought us the Iraq debacle, has regrouped under a new name (http://thinkprogress.org/2009/03/26/kristol-kagan-fpi/). It's now called Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI). And these guys (Bill Kristol and fellow hegemons) are spinning more war adventure ideas even as we speak. But human beings, well, "fugedduboutit."