Calm down, you two! New Shimmer is a floor wax and a dessert topping!

[...]COME FOR THE RADICALISM, STAY FOR THE FUZZY MATH[...]

Our moment is begging the answer to a very simple, yet fundamental question facing us all, rich and poor, multi-ethnic, multi-continental in ancestry, and multi-religious in worship:

What makes an American?

The right to agree to disagree? Greed and Avarice? Small "d" democracy where compromise allows both parties to fight another day? Winner take all? Cruelty in the face of need? Injustice prevailing over justice? Scalia law over common sense law? Stripping rights generations in the making?

Yes, just a sample of what needs to be clearly answered before we can work for a better future, and the general welfare for "the people"! -Kevo

Are there people out there who are stupid enough to allow con-men to spoon-feed crap to them, all while shouting 'liberty!'?

Yes. Yes, there are.

People like me don't say that the Ryan plan is too radical; we say that it's a fraud. The spending cuts are largely fake, either because they're just magic asterisks or because they wouldn't survive politically; the revenue estimates are fake, because they combine huge tax cuts with vague assurances that extra revenue will be found by closing loopholes.

One could say the same for the rosy numbers behind ObamaCare (doc fix) or Obama's budget and economic projections that include more than optimistic unemployment rates and GDP growth.

Steve Benen quoted Paul Krugman: "All I can think here is that reporters are so deep into the Beltway conventional wisdom that this is a Bold, Serious Plan that they just tune out the people saying that no, it's not."

It's a lot simpler than that.

"Reporters" are actually propagandists, paid by giant media corporations (who would profit enormously from Ryan's plan) to tell the American people that this is a "Bold, Serious Plan" and to marginalize and exclude from the public discourse those who say that it's not.

The "Beltway conventional wisdom" doesn't just arise spontaneously. It's a Koch-funded, Madison Avenue-written, focus-group-tested script, and both the Republicans and the corporate media are reading from it.

I think "Privatizing Ryan" should have waited a a few years more before presenting his plan.

There are still enough of us old timers who remember how to do math.

But, after NCLB, and the further cuts to education, soon, fuzzy math will be all the math that there is.

Let's start with the basics - his plan isn't "radical" it is "reactionary".

It is bad enough we label Republican efforts to destroy all of the liberal achievements as "reform" and allow them to turn "liberal" into a dirty word, we should not give them "radical," too.

Ryan the Reactionary, not the Radical. Use it. Use it often.

Tell Claude, the 'doc fix' issue was the result of the republicans passing draconian cuts to funding in Medicare 14 years ago, which had to be remedied. Moreover, the 'doc fix' has been around since the late 90's, but the republicans, who held congress and the White House for a good chunk of that time, didn't even attempt to fix it.

Trying to pin the 'doc fix', which is a completely separate issue from the health care bill, on Obama is just deceitful.

SecularAnimist is dead on. This is yet another 'coordinated' by the Corporate Media: it's what the millionaire punditry are HIRED TO DO. So of course they is a complete shutout of any other plan. One of the Democratic congressmen has his own plan that is the reverse of Ryan's Zarathustra economic plan yet almost no one knows about it. Or how about Senator Sanders, the ONLY SENATOR WHO HAS PROPOSED ACTUALLY RAISING THE TAXES ON THE RICH, who received exactly no attention by the Corporate Media at all even though 80 percent of our population supports exactly that.

Buy not one 'Villager' even talks about it because they are not hired to do that. They are nothing but corporate employees who are expected to do what they are hired to do. In reality these 'media elite' are actually criminals, journalistic criminals who are committing a fraud on the American public. That fraud is defined by the corporate propaganda that they are hired to broadcast. So they sit there in their festooned is their million dollar suites, ties, and dresses and commit that propaganda through the TV sets that we all watch.

It's a totally rigged game that is being employed, and these corporate shit stains called the punditry is playing it exactly they way they have been hired to do.

@Tell Claude, uh, no. CBO has run the numbers several times, and they add up. And where CBO doesn't agree with the administration, instead of trying to discredit CBO, as Paul Ryan has several times done, the WH engages in a transparent, point-by-point analysis pointing out why they disagree with CBO's conclusions.

Here is that democratic congressmen plan .. how many have even heard of it ? This is the most practical plan of all, and it will never see the light of day ...

***********************

House progressives offer budget plan: Tax the rich, end the wars, slash oil subsidies, invest in jobs

By Sahil Kapur
Monday, April 11th, 2011 -- 11:40 am

Liberal Dems claim the plan eliminates deficit by 2021

WASHINGTON - As the focus on Capitol Hill shifts to America's long-run fiscal woes, Congressional progressives are one step ahead of the White House and Democratic leaders in offering a counter-proposal to the House GOP approach.

The broad sketch proposes to end the Bush-era tax cuts on high income earners, enact a surtax on millionaires and billionaires, increase the the estate tax and eliminate corporate tax loopholes and subsidies for oil and coal companies. It also aims to create a public health insurance option, end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and invest $1.45 trillion in "job creation," energy, housing and education programs.

The revenue-heavy proposal (PDF) stands in stark contrast to the spending cuts-oriented plan put forth by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) -- and championed by GOP leaders -- that slashes $6 trillion in federal programs (including Medicare and Medicaid) while significantly reducing taxes for wealthy Americans and corporations.

"This budget is transparent, straightforward and realistic about where we are in America right now," Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), co-chair of the progressive caucus, told Raw Story. "The Ryan plan, for all the credit it gets for thinking big, doesn’t reflect the reality of the American economy. It destroys the successful programs that made this country strong, especially Medicare and education, and doesn't even try to explain how it creates jobs. It reflects a faith that making government disappear will somehow create prosperity."

The plan is a nonstarter in the GOP-led House and would have a hard time winning over more than a handful of Democrats in the Senate. But Grijalva and his progressive caucus co-chair Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) wrote a letter urging Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), the top Democrat on the budget committee, to consider their ideas in the Democratic counter-offer this week.

In contrast to the Ryan plan, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says will eliminate the deficit by 2040, the progressive proposal -- which its authors have dubbed the "People's Budget" -- promises to yield surpluses by 2021, though it doesn't provide numbers to back the claim.

"We need an alternative that actually creates jobs, closes corporate tax loopholes, ends wasteful subsidies, protects Medicare and education, and puts this country back on the right track," Grijalva said. "We believe the American people deserve a choice, and that’s what we intend to give them."

While the Ryan proposal is likely to pass the GOP-led House when it's taken up this week, the progressive blueprint is highly unlikely to reflect the official Democratic opening bid. President Barack Obama is poised to unveil his fiscal 2012 budget Wednesday, and it's believed to seek spending cuts while returning high-income tax rates to Clinton-era levels.

Both parties agree on the need to reduce the nation's massive long-term deficits. And the progressive leaders framed their proposal in terms of who will pick up the tab: the wealthy, or struggling Americans. The GOP proposal, they argue, would "tak[e] trillions of dollars from the pockets of the middle class and giv[e] ever more generous windfalls to millionaires and large corporations."

Republicans vociferously oppose increasing taxes -- including on the wealthiest earners and corporations -- warning that doing so would hamper the economic recovery. America's budget problems, they argue, are caused by excessive spending as opposed to a revenue shortage.

When I first started reading this website, I was pretty skeptical of the coporatist media line.

However. After the schtick in which NBC news didn't bother to cover the "GE doesn't pay taxes" story, and the recent spate of stories in which I discovered that news readers like Brian WIlliams make 10+ million, I am starting to see the light ....

Any real plan to work on the US budget would hit overpaid nonproductive members of society - like, people who sit on their asses and read stories for 21 minutes / day. Of course you wouldn't want to explain the math - it would point directly at them and their bedfellows!

And who exactly are the overpaid people in our economy??

Wow, kevo, that's really good. As they say, a budget is a statement of values. What ARE our shared American values? Greed and selfishness? Was Gordon Gecko right? Is this what it's finally come to?

I'd love to see Democrats start coming out with your phrases. "Cruelty in the face of need." That really states it.

My own take on this is that liberals should stop basing their arguments against plans like Ryan's on compassion, and start basing them on the practical application of mathmatics. Ryan's plan is bad, not because of the moral issue of abandoning disadvantaged citizens, but because it simply doesn't add up.

Generally, conservatives believe government programs like Medicare and Medicaid encourage an ever increasing reliance on government for services which they should be finding ways to provide for themselves. Whether or not this is true, it is a position which an honest and morally consistant person can take.

On the other hand, the issue of cutting or expanding any government program can be judged on how it either positively or negatively affects private enterprise, which - like it or not - is the ultimate source of funding for those programs.

Funny, but no one on the liberal side is talking about how amazing a practical and obvious benefit Canadian style, single payer universal health care would be for private industry.

One of the biggest reasons behind GM's failure to compete against foreign competitors has always been the crushing cost of healthcare for current and retired workers. Yet, GM Canada doesn't have this problem - a situation which encourages the transfer of GM production - and jobs - to GM Canada!

Gee , the non partisan congressional accounting office says the same things that the chief executive says about the Affordable Care Act . Where's the zesty cheez in that pie ?
Obama bases analysis on common objects , dependable routinely observable repeatable events . The Conservatives are a perfect mirror of that , (isn't that adorable !) in the numbing regularity the choir warms up the hymns to Voo Doo economics .
People who write oxymoron's into novellas with a straight face are unashamed to posit "Liberal Fascism" while qualifying every thrust at establishing that , with a humiliating climb down one or two paragraphs on .
Yes it is fun , fun , fun all the time where the money you spend is the money from great wealth . Free to expound upon how being wealthy is the only talent the invisible hand blushes for , or as is plainly evident , the only proper voice for less the virtuous to be able to listen to .

kevo and zandru,
NICE!!!

Yeah, a statement on values would help.

What I find interesting in Ryan's plan is the voucher system. Surely this would require the government to mandate seniors buy insurance. But isn't that unconstitutional according to the right's understanding of the commerce clause?