Paul Krugman On The Paul Ryan Tax Plan

[TomCADem]

Krugman pretty much cuts to the chase even faster than usual. Bravo!

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/

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Paul Ryan’s Roadmap for America’s Future has drawn a lot of admiring commentary from self-described reasonable conservatives — which just goes to show that no matter how many times Lucy pulls away the football, Charlie Brown will keep on trying to kick it.

In fact, the plan is a huge gift to the very, very well off, while actually raising taxes for 60 percent of tax units.

Oh, and the claims that it’s fiscally responsible are phony; basically, Ryan pulled a fast one by having the CBO evaluate his spending proposals but not his revenue-bleeding tax proposals.

[skids]

1. Shorter Krugman:

This plan is

[The Magistrate]

2. And The Devil, Sir, As Usual, Is In The Details....

"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.

Because of the Ryan plan’s enormous tax cuts for the affluent, even the very large benefit cuts that the plan would make in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security — and the plan’s middle-class tax increases — would not put the federal budget on a sustainable course for decades. The federal debt would soar to about 175 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) by 2050. In contrast, most fiscal policy analysts recommend that the debt-to-GDP ratio be stabilized within the next ten years, and at a far lower level."

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3114

[midnight]

4. Why doesn't he go work for wall street?

[Faygo Kid]

3. The top 1% would hire the best tax lawyers to assure they pay nothing.

Paul Ryan knows very well where his bread is buttered. He wants nothing more than gated communities for the very wealthy and the rest of us to serve them.

He is a total fraud.