Republicans Want To Raise Your Taxes

Filed in National by on March 11, 2010

Paul Ryan is a Wisconsin Republican and a rising star in the party. He’s the ranking member of the House Budget Committee and several weeks ago he unveiled his plan for balancing the budget. It was a Republican plan on steroids – huge tax cuts for the wealthy, elimination of Social Security and Medicare and replacement of them with vouchers. A group called the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities examined Ryan’s budget and found it’s worse than we thought:

The tax cuts for those at the very top would be of historic proportions. A new analysis by the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center (TPC) finds:

  • The Ryan plan would cut in half the taxes of the richest 1 percent of Americans — those with incomes exceeding $633,000 (in 2009 dollars) in 2014.
  • The higher one goes up the income scale, the more massive the tax cuts would be. Households with incomes of more than $1 million would receive an average annual tax cut of $502,000.
  • The richest one-tenth of 1 percent of Americans — those whose incomes exceed $2.9 million a year — would receive an average tax cut of $1.7 million a year. These tax cuts would be on top of those that high-income households would get from making the Bush tax cuts, which are due to expire at the end of 2010, permanent.

To offset some of the cost of these massive tax cuts, the Ryan plan would place a new consumption tax on most goods and services, a measure that would increase taxes on most low- and middle-income families. TPC finds that:

  • About three-quarters of Americans — those with incomes between $20,000 and $200,000 — would face tax increases. For example, households with incomes between $50,000 and $75,000 would face an average tax increase of $900. (These estimated changes in taxes are relative to the taxes that would be paid under a continuation of current policy — i.e., what tax liabilities would be if the President and Congress make permanent the expiring 2001 and 2003 tax cuts and relief from the alternative minimum tax.)
  • The plan would shift tax burdens so substantially from the wealthy to the middle class that people with incomes over $1 million would face much lower effective tax rates than middle-income families would. That is, they would pay much smaller percentages of their income in federal taxes.

The Republicans will call this a tax cut because overall tax revenue will be smaller. Because of the massive tax cuts in this plan, it doesn’t even begin to address the deficit for 50 years – long after Paul Ryan and the Republicans that would vote for this plan have left office. It’s the culmination of 30 years of magical Republican thinking, which in reality rewards wealth over work. I doubt this plan will go anywhere but people should know – this is what the Republicans want to do when they talk about taxes and entitlements.

h/t Washington Monthly

Tags: , ,

About the Author ()

Opinionated chemist, troublemaker, blogger on national and Delaware politics.

Comments (6)

Trackback URL | Comments RSS Feed

Sites That Link to this Post

  1. Example 8397 : Delaware Liberal | March 14, 2010
  1. just kiddin says:

    No place to put this so here goes. Slate today. “Health care could kill college loan reform”. “Obama’s plan to end “corporate profit on government loans for college students”….well ole Carpetbagger Tom Carper is at it AGAIN. Carpetbagger, Lincoln, Ben/Bill Nelson, Mark Warner and Jim Webb are united to kill this bill.

    The education bill is strongly opposed by “some” demorats, particularly in states where “for profit student lenders are major employers”? Can you beat this! Why does Tom Carper hate the american people? He is so in the bag for corporate America, we should cease and desist from calling him a DEMOCRAT….BUT A DEMORAT.

  2. anon says:

    The Federal direct student loan program is a great example of a public option competing with private providers. It works. We know it works because the banks never stopped attacking it.

    It was passed by Congress but vetoed by George HW Bush. It was passed again and was one of the first bills Clinton signed. But it was defunded during the Bush years, which also saw the creation of the Student Loan Consolidation program in which Direct Loan borrowers were bombarded with teaser rates to convert their loans to private loans (but minus the protections of the Direct Loans).

    wikipedia: “Funding for the Federal Direct Student Loan Program has decreased from just over $7 billion in 2006 to $509 million budgeted for 2008”

  3. Scott P says:

    Glad to see the rising intellectual of the GOP is keeping those fresh ideas coming. So if I’ve got this straight, temporarily increasing the deficit to stave off economic ruin is bad. Extending any and/or better health care to millions while lowering the deficit is bad and somehow will cause my grandkids to live off of ramen noodles, I think. But giving massive tax breaks to the wealthy few (again) at the expense of the vast majority of Americans (again) and massively cutting services for the poor (again), all while doing little or nothing about the deficit is good policy. The best I can say is that maybe someday they’ll find an alternate universe where conservative economic theory actually works. ‘Cause it doesn’t in this one.

  4. John Manifold says:

    Don’t cite Slate. The actual reporting was done by a real newspaper, The New York Times, not a derivative WaPo-owned site that cribs others’ work.

  5. cassandra_m says:

    Holy Moly. The CBO didn’t even score the Ryan thing:

    Assertions that the Ryan plan is fiscally responsible rest on a serious misunderstanding of a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis of the plan. CBO only partially analyzed the Ryan plan. Contrary to some media reports, CBO has not prepared an actual cost estimate of it. [2] CBO generally does not produce estimates of the effects of proposed changes in tax policies; that is the responsibility of the Joint Committee on Taxation. In its analysis of the Ryan plan, CBO did not attempt to measure the revenue losses that Rep. Ryan’s proposals would generate.

    Instead, as its report states, CBO simply used an assumption specified by Rep. Ryan’s staff that the overall level of revenues would remain unchanged from what the federal government would collect through 2030 under current policies, and would equal 19 percent of GDP in later years. CBO did not find that the Ryan plan actually would achieve these assumed revenue levels. (For commentary by Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center on the widespread misunderstanding of the CBO analysis, see the box below.)

    The reality is different; TPC finds that the Ryan plan would result in very large revenue losses relative to current policies. TPC estimates that even with its middle-class tax increases, the plan would reduce federal revenues to 16 percent of GDP in 2014. Because the tax cuts for the wealthy would dwarf the tax increases for the middle class, the Ryan plan would allow the federal debt to continue growing for a number of decades to come, despite its steep cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

    No CBO score (or one based on Ryan’s Trust Me numbers) and leaves an even bigger deficit than the one we have now? Somebody please tell me that this is getting wall to wall cable coverage….