Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
It appears that the crazy train has left the station. The GOP's alleged boy genius, Ayn Rand fanboy Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), has offered his dystopian Randian vision for America's future.
But Ryan's radical vision is not the most radical. There are crazy people in the House GOP who are even more radical, who don't think that the Flimflam Man does enough damage.
The Republican Study Committee (RSC) has jumped into the fray with their own budget proposal. Think Progress reports, The Most Radical Proposals In The House Conservative Budget:
The Republican Study Committee (RSC), helmed by Chairman Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) released an even more radical plan than the official House Republican budget, which disproportionately guts programs for low-income Americans while giving even bigger tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans. The RSC budget purports to eliminate the deficit in just 4 years and limit total discretionary spending to $950 billion, the lowest level since 2008. In order to achieve this goal, the RSC cuts non-defense spending by $6 billion over four years, while the GOP budget slows spending growth over the same period.
Here are 5 of the most extreme proposals in the budget from the RSC, of which roughly two-thirds of Republicans in Congress are members:
1. Raise the retirement age to 70. The RSC budget would delay eligibility for Medicare and Social Security benefits to age 70, while calculating cost-of-living adjustments using chained CPI, which cuts benefits by $1300 a year for each recipient. Raising the eligibility age for Medicare would force seniors to pay $11.4 billion in extra costs.
2. Reinstate Bush tax cuts. Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans have greatly exacerbated income inequality while doing little for economic growth. As such, President Obama allowed the tax cuts for people making over $450,000 a year to expire at the end of 2012. The RSC would reintroduce those tax cuts, eliminating $823 billion in revenue and adding $950 billion back into the deficit over ten years.
3. Freeze all spending for four years. In order to meet the fantastical goal of eliminating the deficit in four years, the RSC budget would cap all discretionary spending to $950 billion, allegedly close to 2008 spending levels but actually around $100 billion less when adjusted for inflation. It would then freeze all discretionary spending at that level until 2017, when the budget would supposedly be balanced.
4. Eliminates the National Labor Relations Board, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Public Broadcasting. The RSC budget entirely does away with the NLRB, which oversees labor practices, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which the budget states is a “government-supported media outlet” against the principles of “a free society,” and the National Endowment for the Arts, which is “an inappropriate function of the federal government and is nowhere justified in the Constitution.”
5. Repeal Obamacare. The House has wasted more than 30 votes trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, undeterred by public opinion or a Supreme Court decision. Still, the RSC budget would repeal Obamacare, kicking more than 30 million Americans off their insurance and once again allowing insurance companies to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions.
The New York Times today gave op-ed space to Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) to promote this far-right radical vision. Paul Ryan’s Ax Isn’t Sharp Enough:
THE latest budget proposal by Representative Paul D. Ryan, called “The Path to Prosperity,” is anything but. It fails to seriously address runaway government spending, the most pressing problem facing our nation. I cannot vote for something that would trick the American people into thinking that Congress is fixing Washington’s spending problem, when in actuality we’d just be allowing it to continue without end.
Supporters of the “Path to Prosperity,” including many of my fellow Republicans, say that we have to stop spending money we don’t have, an idea I promote every chance I get. But under the proposal by Mr. Ryan of Wisconsin, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, the federal government would continue to spend more than it will this year.
Spending would grow by an average of 3.4 percent annually, only slightly less than the rate under President Obama’s plan, which is 5 percent a year. After 10 years — Mr. Ryan’s target for eliminating the deficit — the “Path to Prosperity” will have spent $41 trillion, when the president’s plan would allow spending of $46 trillion. My party’s de facto position has become “we’re increasing spending, but not as much as the other guy.” That’s not good enough.
Just reducing growth in spending does almost nothing. We have to dig deeper and make profound cuts now. We cannot continue to assume that future Congresses will do our dirty work for us.
We ought to get rid of certain federal departments and agencies, stopping only to shift the role of governing back to the states, where it belongs. The Departments of Education and Energy, for example, are two bloated bureaucracies that we don’t need; their core functions would be absorbed by the states through block grants, saving taxpayers at least $500 billion over the next decade.
Constitutionally speaking, the federal government should not have a role in K-12 public education anyway. Overpaid Washington bureaucrats shouldn’t be deciding how to provide for teachers and students, whose own state and local governments are better equipped to understand their needs. A Heritage Foundation study showed that in 2010, the average salary of an Education Department employee reached $103,000 — nearly double the average public-school teacher’s salary. Let’s phase out a large portion of the department’s roughly $70 billion budget. We can transfer the remaining dollars directly to the states, where they will be used more wisely.
Let’s also abolish the Energy Department, which is one of the biggest federal culprits responsible for the mismanagement of taxpayer dollars. Without unending government backing, the Energy Department would have ceased to exist long ago because of its ineffectiveness, corruption and poor investment strategy. Taxpayers are now on the hook for hundreds of millions of squandered dollars because of failed federal loans given to green companies like Solyndra and Fisker Automotive.
The only constitutionally necessary service provided by the Energy Department is regulation of the nation’s stockpile of atomic weapons, a function that can return to the Department of Defense. Eliminating this bureaucracy would be a large, permanent spending cut, and restore energy-related venture capitalism to its natural home, the private sector.
Our spending crisis is so severe that we can’t stop at these two departments — there are more areas to cut. For example, we should also phase out the federal highway financing system and allow states to keep their own gas tax receipts. States would then be free to determine their own transportation needs and explore creative funding for roads like public-private partnerships.
As a family doctor for more than 30 years, I understand that we must look for savings in our health care system too. I recently co-sponsored legislation that would convert Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program into state-managed programs through a single federal block grant. This would save approximately $2 trillion over 10 years by capping federal funding at 2012 levels for the next 10 years and giving states an incentive to seek out and eliminate waste, fraud and abuse. The government agency closest to the consumer can most efficiently manage taxpayer dollars.
We’re not done. We must repeal Obamacare — including the associated taxes, which the Ryan budget leaves intact by assuming the enactment of tax reform later on. We’ll replace it with a market-based health care system devoid of government involvement and managed by patients and their doctors, a plan I have described in my Patient Option Act.
If we get government out of the way and put Medicare in patients’ hands by increasing contribution limits to health savings accounts, it will transform Medicare into a more flexible premium assistance program.
To cap all this off — literally — I have proposed a balanced-budget amendment that would force Congress to stick to the principle of not spending more than we take in. Passing a constitutional amendment is no easy task. While it’s a large undertaking, I’ll continue to fight for its passage. Just a few weeks ago, the House put enough pressure on the Senate to force it to produce a budget — something Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader, hadn’t attempted in over four years. If we keep up the pressure, we’ll continue to see results.
Rather than nibbling around the edges as the Ryan proposal does, we must do all of this and much more now. There is a “Path to Prosperity,” but Mr. Ryan’s budget isn’t it. The only way to protect our nation’s financial future as well as our citizens’ liberty is to stop the outrageous spending in Washington and permanently reduce the size of our overreaching federal government.
Unbelievably, this guy is an M.D. (i don't know how that is possible). You may remember Rep. Paul Broun for some of his other views. Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA): An Anti-Science Legislator Who Serves on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology:
Rep. Paul Broun is the chairman of the House Science Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight. Broun doesn’t just think that the “scientific community” has perpetrated a hoax about climate change—he also thinks scientists have made up lies about evolution, the age of planet Earth, the Big Bang Theory, and embryology…and that those lies come “straight from the pit of Hell.”
During a speech that Broun gave at the 2012 Sportsman’s Banquet at Liberty Baptist Church in Hartwell, Georgia on September 27th, he said this:
God’s word is true. I’ve come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the big bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell. It’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior. You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I’ve found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I don’t believe that the earth’s but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says.
In his speech, Broun claimed that as a legislator he takes direction from the Bible:
And what I’ve come to learn is that it’s the manufacturer’s handbook, is what I call it. It teaches us how to run our lives individually, how to run our families, how to run our churches. But it teaches us how to run all of public policy and everything in society. And that’s the reason as your congressman I hold the Holy Bible as being the major directions to me of how I vote in Washington, D.C., and I’ll continue to do that.
He continued:
Our Constitution was written by men that believed that! And in fact, the Constitution’s written on Biblical principles — in fact, the three branches of government come right from Isaiah, Isaiah 33:22, go look it up!
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