Ryan Budget Cuts Spending By $5 Trillion

by JASmius

Or, rather, it would cut federal spending by $5 trillion over the next ten years, in another, decidedly non-parallel quantum reality:

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan unveiled an updated Republican budget plan Tuesday that would slash $5.1 trillion in federal spending over the coming decade and promises to balance the government's books with wide-ranging cuts in programs like food stamps and government-paid healthcare for the poor and working class. 

Ryan's plan would also cut Pell Grants for low-income students and pensions for federal workers, while steering away from cuts to benefits for senior citizens, at least in the short term. The proposal would reprise a voucher-like Medicare program for future retirees that would be the basis for GOP claims that the measure would drive down government debt over the long term.

And that doesn't, I'm presuming, include the repeal of ObamaCare, which can be assumed as a currently-dormant add-on worth a couple of trillion more.  Put Scott Walker in the White House in 2016, re-Reaganize federal economic policy, and a great deal more federal tax revenue can be thrown in the proverbial pot as well.

But it's all a hypothetical maybe for an unspecifiable somewhen.  In the brutal reality of the Obama here & now, it's as extinct as the dinosaurs.  And probably not just from the Democrat side of the battle lines:

The plan should skate through the House Budget Committee on Wednesday but faces challenges on the floor next week since it endorses a bipartisan pact — negotiated by Ryan and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat, in December — to increase agency operating budgets this year and next.

Many conservatives who opposed the pact last year would have to reverse course and embrace them as part of the GOP budget. Democrats who helped pass the Ryan-Murray pact in December will oppose the GOP plan.

I put it to you in the most sardonic, rhetorical tone imaginable: How many Tea Party congresscritters do you think will embrace Ryan's budget blueprint with the Sequester-busting Murray-Ryan provisions attached?  Yeah, I'd say that's about right.

Of course, it doesn't matter all that much, any more than the Obama budget does (other than the fact that he has the power - not the legal authority, but the amputated, untrammeled power - to just impose it by Executive decree).  These budget resolutions are majority-party mission statements, not actual binding legislation.  And as far apart as the Ryan and Obama budgets are, you can see where this is headed - yet another last-minute continuing resolution six months from now, which will lean heavily towards the Democrats' budget priorities because the GOP will be absolutely loathe to force another government shutdown showdown barely a month away from what's shaping up to be another blowout midterm election romp.  Which will undoubtedly stir up the ire of the Ted Cruz-led "suicide caucus," spitefully depress center-right turnout, and perhaps save the Senate for the Dems.

Am I getting ahead of myself?  Very well, so I do.  I am fast, I mentally outrun multitudes.  But all I really have to do is not be the slowest.

Getting back to the big picture, Ryan's Medicare and Medicaid reform - not cuts, but reform - marketizing and decentralizing these entitlement programs respectively, are inevitable if there is any realization on the Dark Side that the alternative is fiscal and economic collapse.  They just are.  We're way, way past the point of being able to ease into them gradually.  Heck, we may already be past the point of no return - or "going over the falls," in Mr. Gibbs' analogy, beyond the power of any outboard motor to overcome.  In my optimistic - which is to say, less lucid - moments, I picture Scott Walker selling the critical necessity of de-entitlementizing the United States sufficiently that enough voters will "get" and accept that this is something that has to be done.  Then my lucidity returns in a nauseating rush, and I remember that Barack Obama is never leaving office.  Man, optimism is the cruelest tease of all.

Although, can't you see Paul Ryan getting snapped up by an incoming Walker Administration for OMB Director?  Maybe that's the future prospect for which Eddie Muster is laying the foundation now, because his budget sure as shinola isn't headed anywhere except for the mass grave where his last three lie, moldering.