Congressman Ryan’s Wealth Transfer (Budget) Plan

There are two parts to the Ryan budget plan:

1.) eliminate the costs of our safety net for those citizens not like Ryan and his fellow conservatives without conscience (CWC) and then 2.) take those savings in spending and transfer them to individuals like him – the mega and ultra rich.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) summarizes the cuts for those not like Ryan:

… The Ryan plan contains $4.3 trillion in spending cuts over ten years. Using conservative estimates, the budget cuts in programs for people of modest means would total roughly $2.9 trillion and probably more, or at least two-thirds of the total. (For a more detailed explanation of these figures, see this brief CBPP analysis.)

The plan contains $1.4 trillion in Medicaid cuts over ten years (which includes repeal of the health reform law’s Medicaid expansion); large cuts in food stamps, low-income housing, Pell Grants, and other programs for people with limited incomes; and repeal of the health reform law’s subsidies to help low- and moderate-income people purchase health insurance. …

The CBPP also describes the savings transferred to the mega and ultra rich:

On the tax side, the Ryan plan would make permanent all of the Bush tax cuts for high-income Americans, as well as the striking estate-tax giveaway included in the December 2010 tax package that benefits the estates of only the wealthiest one-quarter of 1 percent of Americans who die, at a cost of tens of billions of dollars. The Ryan plan loses $700 billion over ten years from making the high-end tax cuts permanent. People with incomes over $1 million would receive average tax cuts of $125,000 a year — or more than $1 million over the coming decade — if these tax cuts are made permanent, according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. The $125,000 figure does not include the additional tax cuts that high-income households would receive from the evisceration of the estate tax (or from additional cuts that people earning at least $1million a year would receive from Ryan’s call to cut the top tax rate to 25 percent as part of revenue neutral tax reform).

With that, a few rhetorical questions.

Why does Ryan’s wealth transfer plan have an age limit for his changes to Medicare? If his plan is so great, why not apply it to all, now?

Why does Ryan’s wealth transfer plan assume that the recent growth in food stamp costs, which are caused by the Great Recession, will continue unabated into the future of his budget? Does he understand that his plan won’t produce jobs and unemployment will continue at double it’s normal rate or worse?

Why does the Ryan wealth transfer plan cut Pell grants and thus “reduce the opportunity for many individuals to lift themselves out of poverty?” Are Ryan and his super rich friends afraid of the competition or do they just want to minimize the number of slices in the wealth pie?

Why does Ryan’s wealth transfer plan not reduce the deficit by reducing corporate welfare and other “tax expenditures?” Instead it protects corporate loop holes and massive tax write-offs for the mega and ultra rich.

Why does Ryan’s wealth transfer plan privatize Medicare by forcing the elderly to not only pay more for healhcare services, but to also pay higher administrative fees and a privatization fee called profit?