Matt Yglesias

House GOP Not Whipping for April Fool’s Budget

Conservatives have been lambasting President Barack Obama for proposing a budget that allegedly taxes too much, spends too much, and borrows too much. Naturally, the administration started pushing its opponents to offer an alternative since if you commit to cutting taxes and borrowing less than Obama, then the only thing you can do is propose brutal and unpopular spending cuts. And yesterday Rep Paul Ryan (R-WI) offered up his April Fool’s Budget, full of draconian cuts, and goofy analysis and gimmicks. Now that the leadership has officially gone on record with an alternative “budget,” however, they’re not going to actually try to get vulnerable members to vote for it. But they are going to keep whipping opposition to the President’s plan:

Republican leaders have panned the Democratic plan for “spending too much, taxing too much and borrowing too much,” and are whipping Members against it, but not whipping for the GOP alternative, said Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the Chief Deputy Whip.

The biggest issue for Republicans in sticking together at today’s vote rests with their moderates, who may balk at measures contained in the GOP blueprint, which includes a five-year freeze on domestic discretionary spending. Last year, 38 Republicans opposed Ryan’s budget proposal.

“A lot of the middle-of-the-road Republicans are thinking of voting against it,” Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-Mo.) said.

Emerson said that the GOP proposal’s numbers were not even adjusted for inflation and that it was a pretty hefty lift. But she added that she had yet not read Ryan’s blueprint.

Thus there’s still no alternative the opposition is willing to actually stand behind. This sort of thing is why it’s proving difficult to achieve any sort of bipartisan cooperation in Washington at the moment. The GOP leadership is leaning very hard on members to vote “no” on everything, but not doing anything to try to foster viable alternative proposals. That kind of one-sided party discipline is a recipe for polarization. They have their reasons for doing this, and I don’t begrudge them their right to use whatever legislative tactics they like best. But it should be understood that this is a tactical choice on their part and not something the White House could really stop.

April Fool’s Budget Relies on Inconsistent Tax Rates

The April Fool’s Budget released today contains, naturally, generous tax cuts for the wealthy. One such tax break is that they propose to offer Americans a “choice” between the current tax system, or else you could choose to pay a marginal tax rate for income up to $100,000 of 10 percent and 25 percent for any income thereafter.” Since right now the top marginal tax rate is 35 percent, that would be a huge tax cut for wealthy Americans. And of course wealthy Americans would choose the option that’s cheaper for them. This would sharply reduce government revenue and lead to large budget deficits.

But one of the April Fool’s Plan’s conceits is that it’s supposed to produce low deficits. How to accomplish that? Well, Ryan Grim points out that one thing Paul Ryan did to make the math work out is assume people would choose to pay the higher rate:

But the real way that Republicans offer the tax cut without factoring it into the budget’s revenue is to suggest that Americans won’t actually take advantage of the lower rates. Instead, the GOP budget permanently extends President Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. A Republican budget committee aid said that the revenues assumed in the GOP budget are based on the current tax structure that resulted from those cuts. [...] Under the current tax code, an individual making more than $160,850 pays a 33 percent rate; under the Republican plan, that taxpayer could choose to pay 25 percent instead. (For a family, the income threshold is $195,850.) For a family earning more than $349,700, the rate rises to 35 percent, but filers could still choose the 25 percent rate.

It would be nice to have a real debate between progressive and conservative ideas about the course of public policy instead of needing to spend all this time hunting around for gimmicks.

Paul Ryan’s Break With the Past: Tax Cuts for the Rich!

Paul Ryan reaches deep into the conservative movement’s storehouse of ideas on America’s most pressing policy programs and comes up with an innovative agenda of tax cuts mostly tilted toward the wealthy and corporations paired with a five-year freeze on discretionary spending. If, superficially, this seems like a warmed-over version of the McCain campaign economic agenda that the voters rejected just a few months ago, you need to pay more attention—McCain was just calling for a one-year freeze on discretionary spending after which reductions in government outlays would be achieved by magic. Ryan, by contrast, is proposing a five-year freeze.

Basically, you can imagine a school that today is serving a certain number of children and has a certain budget. Well, over the course of five years the population will grow and the number of kids in that school will also increase. But the school won’t get any additional money. Instead, because there’s inflation, the school will actually be getting less money even as it needs to teach more children. And so on across the board for federal programs. If you think that there’s literally nothing in the entire federal budget that’s useful, this may strike you as an appealing idea. Otherwise, April fools!

Meanwhile, the op-ed is a bit unclear on this point, but it appears to include a proposal to scrap Medicare in favor of a system of vouchers. The idea here is to “solve” the problem of health care cost inflation driving higher Medicare costs by replacing a guarantee of health care with a guarantee of a lump sum of money that would not grow as rapidly as the cost in health care. Basically, we would “solve” the problem of paying for senior citizens’ health care by just . . . not paying for senior citizens’ health care. Demonstrating a lack of commitment to the underlying principle, Ryan promises not to actually afflict anyone currently over the age of 55 with this policy. The hope is that everyone born since 1954 is too short-sighted to actually care about what fate awaits them upon retirement, while the guarantee of continued actual Medicare for those born before 1954 is supposed to immunize Ryan from their wrath.

GOP Leadership Rivals Throw Mike Pence Under the Bus

I’ve seen a lot of people link to this Glenn Thrush Politico item, but I have a slightly different take on it:

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) raised objections to an abbreviated alternative budget “blueprint” released today — but were told by House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) they needed to back the plan, according to several Republican sources. [...] “In his egocentric rush to get on camera, Mike Pence threw the rest of the Conference under the bus, specifically Paul Ryan, whose staff has been working night and day for weeks to develop a substantive budget plan,” said a GOP aide heavily involved in budget strategy. [...] “It’s categorically untrue,” said Pence spokesman Matt Lloyd. “Cantor as well as Ryan and the rest of the leadership have been part of this process for weeks. They not only signed off on it, but their staffs helped edit it.”

To me the salient point here is that Pence’s spokesman is almost certainly telling the truth here, and the Cantor and Ryan staffers saying otherwise are almost certainly lying. As a simple matter of logic, Thrush’s item doesn’t really make sense. Look at the problems the majority party has keeping its caucus on message and united on matters of tactics and substance. There’s no way John Boehner could possibly force Reps Ryan and Cantor to endorse his joke of a budget if they didn’t want to.

Rather, Reps Ryan and Cantor saw that the press was reacting poorly to the Boehner/Pence flim-flam “budget” and decided to throw their colleagues under the bus. And, frankly, I’m not surprised that Ryan and Cantor were surprised. I was surprised, too. I’ve never really seen political reporters get outraged before about the fact that a policy document makes no sense in the past. It was a curious outbreak of substance among the press corps that I don’t think was particularly foreseeable.

Paul Ryan’s Alternative Budget: $1.5 Million in Tax Bonuses for CEOs

Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI), the Ranking Member of the House Budget Committee, has thoughtfully gone beyond mere whining about the Obama administration’s budget for fellow Obama critics to consider embracing. What’s in it? Well, in a striking break from standard-fare Republican recipes, he’s decided that maybe what the country needs is tax cuts for the rich. I, for one, say it’s about time we gave that a try. My colleague Ben Furnas has some more detailed analysis:

Like the Bush tax cuts, Congressman Ryan and his allies in Congress would cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans and reject public investment or a fairer tax code that would ensure broadly shared prosperity.

The Center for American Progress Action Fund finds that Congressman Ryan’s proposals would cut taxes for the average CEO by $1.5 million per year and do nothing at all for a minimum wage worker.

Ryan calls for lowering the 35%, 33% and 28% income tax brackets to 25%, eliminating the capital gains tax, and cutting the top corporate tax rate from 35% to 25%. These hugely regressive tax cuts would extend the Bush economic strategy of massive tax cuts for the wealthy and gutted government revenue.

It’s strange that the Republicans railing about long-term deficits seem to love long-term deficits when the point of the deficits is to further enrich the rich.