Another long lost news post - 14-18 April 2011

Greetings. We begin with a reminder that the police are not likely on your side when they arrest you, and especially so if you've been involved in something they want shut down.

Have a look at the proper way to respond to homophobic chants against one of your players - the team wears pink and rainbow colors, the noisemakers are pink, and the stadium unfulrs a giant banner proclaiming the team is against prejudice. Why can't we do that here?

A wonderful introduction to the world of the asexual from s.e. smith, a reminiscence on how ableism has subtleties to it and isn't just in building design and accessibility, and a serious whomping to a columnist that believes women who read and like SF/F don't exist.

Last, the Dead Pool Technology Group hires Jerry Lawson, architect of the software cartridge, at 70 years of age.

Out in the world today - the leader of the Government in the United Kingdom is blaming immigrants for the discomfort felt when one can see chunks of culture un-melted in the melting pot. Because it's entirely the immigrant's fault for not assimilating, not the society around them's fault for demanding they do so completely.

An all-female group of pilots and ground crew persons flew a combat sortie, making history as the first completely female combat sortie, and in the process, the debate over women in combat re-opened in the United States. Everywhere else with integrated troops is probably looking at us funny as for why we're even having that conversation.

Libyan forces loyal to Gadaffi are recruiting children to be soldiers, according to sources from inside the military.

The United States Secretary of State made a brief stop in South Korea to discuss trade deals and attempting to get North Korea back to nuclear discussions.

Iran has been busily funding the Karzai government since 2003, according to a previous foreign minister of Afghanistan.

Last for tonight, despite having been told to stop, the United States insists that it will continue violating Pakistan's sovreignity by conducting covert operations and unmanned vehicle missile attacks. Elsewhere, torture porn enthusiasts are miffed that they don't get to work with someone accused of a large nightclub bombing in Bali.

Domestically, wait, what? The Democratic Senate Leader grows a spine? Let's see if he flexes it when the Republicans once again threaten to shut the government down and default on loans by not voting to raise the debt ceiling. We've been at these crossroads before - in one of the earlier times, a war broke out because the Union would not support the thing that some of its elites most desperately wanted. I doubt it will get to war this time, but the question still remains as to how much actual fighting will be done, and whether any of it will be over things that benefit the Union, or whether it will be squabbles over which group of special interests gets the biggest slice of the pie.

In the Utter *Facepalm* Department, TSA agents are more concerned about revenging themselves on those that complain about the TSA than they are about catching the people they're supposed to. Observe, from the guide for people who want to blow things up - the agents are instructed not to bring attention to themselves, which is what complaining would most definitely do. Can we please have effective airport security any time soon?

Mr. Bonds was convicted on a single count of obstruction of justice, while acquitted of three others that said he deliberately used performance-enhancing steroids and lied to investigators about it.

The Texas House of Representatives approved a budget that would require a public university that supports QUILTBAG people with tax monies to spend an equal amount on places that promote anti-QUILTBAG values. In Arizona, the birthers win, but you can be exempted if you have a document proving you have no foreskin.

Continuing in the same vein, the myth persists that black people fought for the Confederacy. After all, when you read the declarations involved of the whys of the Confederacy, you'd be hard-pressed to find any reason for a slave or a black person to fight for them.

For those looking for ancestors in that conflict, a newly-digitzed cache of data contains more than a few names for geneaologists.

Last for this section, the appearance of a movie version of John Galt's petty revenge has many fans of the original work nervous about whether the adaptation will be faithful enough, and slightly miffed that it didn't draw bigger star power. Of course, with any work or adaptation, reading the source is best, but for full understanding, one must also look closely at the author and avoid pigeonholing them into specific tropes or playing up only one side of their complex selves.

In technology, 12 April 1961 was the date 50 years ago that cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth in a manmade spacecraft.

And beware - the ransomware scams are getting worse. Just don't download stuff you don't know, and use protection, please.

In opinions, a suggestion that President Obama played a much better hand than we thought in the budget deal with Republicans, which is much different than the other suggestion saying that a lot of really good programs got it in the shorts.

Mr. Sowell offers a budget plan that would potentially save quite a bit more than either the Ryan or Obama plans - end all corporate welfare, end all subsidies to billionaires, and make Medicare and Social Security opt-out programs for those people who think they can do better in private investments. I think such a plan would have massive savings to the government, and properly targeted, would be quite effective in a lot of ways. Thoes who say that private industry drives the economy will be forced to put their capital where their mouths are, and freely admit to everyone that the reason they're laying off people is to cover the bonus that someone at the top gets. The people who believe they can get a better deal will be free to leave the program and find out how horrible the private sector is in bad times. And the money that's left from stopping all the subsidies can be put to good usage - quite possibly in making sure all the people laid off by those corporations and billionaires can still eat. On the other face of his Janus position, Mr. Sowell decries tax raises on the rich as political statements, instead of ways of raising revenue, because Everyone Knows that you only raise revenue when you cut taxes, so that people stop hiding in tax shelters.

Mr. Giles delights in Donald Trump, believing that he's showing the way to the GOP on how to get after Barack Obama, and that one can attack him in a mean manner and still be popular.

Mr. Brownfield tells the residents of Washington, D.C. to quit bitching, because D.C. will never be a state and is deliberately designed not to become one. Plus, he points out, it's good to be in D.C. when it comes to funding and stimulus spending.

Mr. Flynn returns to the Obama is Carter argument, based on Middle East foreign policy and unwarranted optimism about the people therein when they throw off their strongmen. We suspect he agrees with Mr. Crimi, who sees a strong alliance between Egypt's next government and Iran, basically turning what was an ally in the region into another fanatical enemy devoted entirely to The Bloodthirsty Religion. This is a situation we should be apparently generally afraid of, in addition to the scare of Iran taking over the Middle East, because The Bloodthirsty Religion treats women poorly, regardless of where they are in the world (to her credit, Ms. Chesler does not say to close the borders. To her detriment, however, she seems to believe that there is no way of reforming those who would kill their own to obey the laws of the country they are in, even as she details all the trials of honor killings going on.) No, wait, that's The Bloodthirsty Religion treats everyone poorly, killing anyone they consider to have fallen off the path or who doesn't believe as they do.

Mr. Moran rolls out why he thinks the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. is dangerous and unhinged - she actually believes in the value of the U.N. and thinks the U.S. should be supporting them more fully, instead of thumbing their nose at it like the last administration did.

Winning top billing for being the bottom of the barrel, Mr. Colson trots our "Boys Will Be Boys" and blames feminism and the sexual revolution for why today's young men just can't control themselves and have to create a sexually hostile atmosphere on campus. After all, those women were asking for it when they wanted to be able to control their own sexuality, so they shouldn't be surprised. Mr. Colson also tries to slip past a point saying that Christian colleges and places are far less likely to have those problems. Everyone who has ever been part of private religious education...just laughed a lot. People who have been or seen how fundamentalist religions can be on hypocrisy...laughed even more. Way to victim-blame, slut-shame, and perpetuate the untrue trope that men are controlled by their penises, Mr. Colson. I think the person who told a crowd that the sinless should be free to cast the first stone would like a word with you...

Competing with him, however, is Ms. Lukas, director of the (Conservative) Independent Women's Forum, who says that the pay disparity between men and women has nothing to do with sexism or discrimination and everything to do with how men and women choose to live their lives and work. Since women like stable jobs, they're willing to sacrifice the pay that comes with long hours, dangerous work, the possibility of being employed one day and out of work the next, and other hazards that men take on. It's totally their decision to make less money. And besides, because more men are unemployed right now, clearly The Patriarchy must have screwed up somewhere, right? For the attemtped coup de grace, Ms. Lukas says that if you compare similar cohorts of men and women, (the "just out of college with a degree and no kids" cohort is her example) the women are doing better and are making more money. It's all in your heads, you silly feminists. To which we say the point has been missed that it would be classified as a wild pitch. The wage gap argument that I've always heard is "In similar positions, doing similar work and similar hours, women are paid a percentage less in wages than men are". So while Ms. Lukas's numbers are encouraging and helpful to know, they are not actually relevant, as they take into account different working hour schedules, and make comparisons across professions and positions. Also, I'd like to know how those numbers she cites stack up against older cohorts - the ones that do have kids and have advanced along their career path significantly. I don't know if those numbers would hold up as the men get promoted to upper management and the women stay in theri administrative assistant positions.

Last out, the Obama election killed the anti-war movement, as people believed that Obama was an anti-war President. They also believed a lot of other things that candidate Obama didn't actually say...

Last for tonight, some data on life expectancy - despite claiming to be exceptional, American life expectancy is pretty awful comparatively.

Special Comment: The Ryan Budget and Other Unserious Proposals

Representative Ryan produced his budget, the one created by the House committee, and the one that will be wrangled with in the time to come, as any appropriations bills must originate in the House of Representatives, and the budget is the biggest of the lot. So, let's see what Our Corporate Overlords and their Republican lackeys, the Social Conservative movement, and the Tea-Partiers have in store for us.

Well, just by reading the summary statement, I can tell there's already a tone to be struck with this - namely, that the saving markers are "compared to the President's budget proposal" or to the CBO's current levels. Mr. Ryan does not trust the populace to be able to do mathematics, I guess, and thus presents us with comparative savings instead of absolute savings. Makes me wonder whether we're actually going to save anything at all...

...especially when large tax cuts are also part of the plan to balance the budget. Mr. Ryan and his committee have thus failed the first important part of budgeting and paying down debts - maximize revenue, minimize expenses.

The comparisons continue, with language like "job-killing health care law" and other items that forces us to conider this to be a political document first and only a budgetary document as a distant second. There's also the part where the military continues to get everything it wants and the rest of us suffer, but we'll get into that, as it's time to dive into the sections.

A Choice of Two Futures

Which are... the ostensibly "free-market" path to prosperity of Mr. Ryan, or the profligate "debt-fueled economic crisis" of the status quo and/or the President's proposal. Using his opening gambit to blast the stimulus spending bill that "failed to create promised jobs" (an accurate strike) and resulted in an "unprecedented expansion of government power", Mr. Ryan sounds his whistle to the Tea Party by claiming the American people wanted the government to get back in touch with its limited role, to let family, faith, and entrepreurship be his guides, and predicting dire consequences for those that burden their children and grandchildren with more debt and sell debt to foreign interets. Positioning himself as outside both major political parties , he criticizes them as big spenders, calculating that if he says bad things about both parties, he will be able to escape the criticism that the Republican Party under the last administrator did everything the current one is accused of doing and more. He claims that his budget will be able to right the slowly sinking ship of the United states and take us back on the path to prosperity.

Components of the Federal Budget

And now we get into the nuts and bolts. First up, an overview of spending of FY 2010. He divides the spending into two groups - discretionary (that which is debated by Congress), and autopilot (that which has statutory authority to fund itself). Discretionary spending (the 40%) is further subdivided into defense and non-defense, and Mr. Ryan's scrutiny about waste and duplication falls solely on the non-defense side, having dismissed any need for serious scrutiny for defense by saying that "provide for the common defense" is part of the Constitution, implying you must not be fond of the Constitution if you want to cut or remove waste and duplication from defense spending.

It is in autopilot spending (the 60%) where Mr. Ryan looks to make his budget-cutting killing. After a perfunctory nod to the purpose of those entitlement programs as a safety net for those who attempt to make a living and fail, Mr. Ryan sharpens his knives and says the Big Three - Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, need to be reformed if future generations are to have anything from them at all, because they're rapidly eating up more and more of tax revenues. He identifies three interrelated factors contributing to this increase - demographics, which puts more strain on the system because people are living longer, retiring earlier, and putting more people on the rolls of the Big Three for longer. Thus, those who are still working will have to contribute more of their paychecks to fund those benefits.

This would probably not be a problem were it not for his second point, economics, where we should find out that all those retiring people are having their jobs closed after them, which reduces the ratio of people paying into the system to the people drawing from the system even more. What we see instead, however, is a mypoic focus on Medicare and the health care law, claiming that both have generated phenomenal amounts of wasted money spent by the government on unnecessary care, tests that didn't need to be run, and other items that are inflating the cost of medial care well out of sustainability because the government apparently doesn't cap the amount of money it spends to reimburse providers for their services.

Instead of realizing he's run off the tracks, however, Mr. Ryan chooses to continue burying his train in his third point, claiming there are perverse political incentives to continue with the broken system, like how the federal government matches state spending on Medicaid, which saps innovation (which is apparently born out of the need to make too few dollars care for too many people, or something) and prevents states from exercising control to tailor their program to fit their populations best. So when states are left needing to fill holes in the budget, they do across-the-board cuts, which hurts their subsidies and makes the doctors even less likely to take on Medicaid/Medicare patients because they get less reimbursement. Actually, that sounds reasonable - what Mr. Ryan has added is another Tea Party whistle about where the power of government should lie that taints what would be a reasonable set-up for some serious discussions.

Thus, having claimed the rising tide will consume every dollar the federal government has within a few decades, Mr. Ryan offers us a choice of two paths, having dismissed the path of "fund only those entitlements and let everything else close up shop" and "raise taxes to a rate that is not sustainable by the country" (neither of which are reasonable positions, providing him with the straw men he needs to seem reasonable and centrist) - bringing things under control voluntarily, or waiting until the creditors of United States debt decide to stop financing our borrowing and demand payment for the debt they already have, making for a default threat and a likely sharp drop in spending so as to assuage creditors. He wants everyone to panic and believe that the longer they wait to enact his plan or something like it, the more likely we are to have the decision made for us. He uses examples of how unions and private sector workers had their benefit and retirement packages unceremoniously yanked away from them when those private sectors felt like they didn't have enough money to pay them, and claims the government under default threat will have no choice but to do the same.

Seventeen pages in, Mr. Ryan finally turns his attention to the revenue side of the equation, after making sure one last time to square-peg drive that the problem is really unsustainable spending. He probably could ahve put lorem ipsum here for as much as he wants you to pay attention to it, excepting for the part where he says that the way our of debt hell is to reduce revenues. He accuses the President of both wanting to spend more and raise more revenue, and chasing the spending with tax hikes will only shred the economy further. He dismisses the idea that raising taxes on those who clearly have money to spare would work, because it would require, on average, an extra $500,000 from each person in the top two tax brackets to close the gap. That would be the income groups that make more than $200,000 and more than $373,000 in their adjusted gross income. And that's on average - I'm betting the bigger fish in that sea can make up for the differences in the smaller ones. Moving on, Mr. Ryan suggests that it would be possible to bridge the gap if loopholes were closed in the tax code so that more persons paid taxes, paired with suggesting that the overall rates be lowered in addition to having the holes plugged. Once again, Mr. Ryan fails the basics of plugging a debt hole - maximize revenues, minimize expenditures.

Having spent his obligatory time talking about how raising taxes just won't work, we return to familiar ground - inspiring fear about...

The Crushing Burden of Debt

If left by itself, the debt will kill the economy, he asserts. this from the same person that said not a few pages ago that the creditors would never let that happen, and would force a default before the country went so bankrupt it could not pay anything at all on its debts. A rare lapse in consistency from the normally very consistent Republican. Anyway, Mr. Ryan says that all of the outstanding government debt will soon cause interest rates on new debt to rise rapidly as creditors start to believe that the U.S. will not be able to make good on its obligations. The fact that foreign governments own a significant part of that debt gives Mr. Ryan the ability to raise spectres of China cashing in on all its debt and demanding payment when it loses confidence in the United States, and others following suit. His real fear-strike, however, is aimed squarely at those people who know what the word "stagflation" means because they lived through it. Interest rates rising for households that are overextended on their credit, for the businesses that employ people and use their credit as a requirement of doing business, and austerity measures in government services and spending, combined with severe tax increases. Mr. Ryan concludes his overview portion by saying that a debt crisis would also make America less able to maintain its World Police status and other nations will rise to become superpowers in the U.S.'s wake. So if you don't want a world where China is the dominant power, Mr. Ryan insinuates, then you'll go along with my plan. (He also states that he believes the Republicans were elected to keep taxes low as well as confront spending. He might want to re-think his opinion of the opinion of the American people.)

And now... the nuts, bolts, elbow joints, and wiring that's not up to code. Specifically, here is that code he claims the budget will follow:

This budget offers America a model of government guided by the timeless principles of the American Idea: free market democracy, open competition, a robust private sector bound by rules of honesty and fairness, a secure safety net, and equal opportunity for all under a limited constitutional government of popular consent.

It's time to see the solutions that Mr. Ryan proposes. Starting with

1. Reform the government to make it more efficient, effective, and responsible.
   1. By first and foremost excluding defense spending from any cuts other than those identified from within. Strike one.
   2. Second, all other government agencies must take a hit and freeze (and not the curling kind) because Everyone Knows the private sector deserves those dollars more than the government does, and because governmental agencies have gone beyond their limited mission and need to be pared back. (He also takes a swipe at the gridlock that prevented a budget from getting passed in the last Congress, and blames it entirely on the Democrats not compromising. Opposition not compromising? Where did we see that before?)
   3. Third, he sees lots of savings possible in eliminating duplicate programmes (good, assuming they are, in fact, duplicative) and what he considers to be wasteful spending, incorporating as many ways that he has at his disposal for cuts to be proposed and enacted solely from the Republican side of the aisle (not so good). There's also a continuation of the earmark ban, which, if it produces more cohesive and topic-focused legislation, is pretty good. There's also a singling out of the Department of Transportation and infrastructure spending like high-speed rail as wasteful spending he wants to cut, because who would use trains when everyone should have a perfectly serviceable car to drive everywhere. (Poor people? What poor people?)
   4. Fourth, the hit turns into a stabbing if you work for the government, as Mr. Ryan believes that the government's hiring sucked the private sector dry of doing its own hiring boom and that federal employees make too much money and have too good of benefits compared to their private-sector counterparts. It takes three federal workers retiring or being fired for an agency to be able to hire one worker according to this plan. Even so, if you manage to hang on to your job, sucks to be you - wage freeze for four years, no cost-of-living adjustments or anything.
   5. Fifth, Mr. Ryan unveils his idea of ending corporate welfare:
      • repeal the Dodd-Frank laws because they allegedly lead to endless bailouts,
      • abolish-by-privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the perceived worst offenders and creators of the financial sector crisis,
      • stopping subsidies to alternative energy companies and repealing regulations that force carbon and petroleum companies to give at least an afterthought about the environmental impact of their work, under the guise of promoting competition,
      • and telling farmers that they're doing quite well now and can do without as much subsidy as before. (Agribusiness, yeah, probably. Family farms? Doubtful.)
      Anyone notice who's not getting any consideration for having their subsidies cut? Some of the most profitable industries around - oil companies, Wall Street financial institutions, and other entities that helped to cause the problems and have mostly been exempted from paying or making restitution for them for years now. Mr. Ryan is studiously making sure that the people that might help Republican re-elections are not affected at all by cuts in corporate welfare.
   6. Sixth, Mr. Ryan proposes that government spending be permanently capped as a certain percentage of GDP, that any proposed increases be met with cuts to maintain the balance, force all entitlement programs to have a ten-year maximum life before review, and force reviews of entitlement programs, subjecting them to the appropriations processes and the politicians that will more than willingly use entitlement programs and their recipients as bargaining chips.
   
   As an aside, there's also several callouts on how awful and horrible the health care bill is and why it deserves to be repealed in full, but they're scattered across all the various sections. I'll take care of them at the very end.
   
   
2. Strengthen the Social Safety Net is part two of the proposal. Based on the track record of the Republican party about entitlements, and the material already laid out by Mr. Ryan above, there's a serious hole that any Republican proposal has to climb out of for a claim like "Strengthen the Social Safety Net" to not be laughed out of the room upon being presented. Mr. Ryan continues to dig the hole by talking about how welfare and other safety net programs as they are encourage people to live off the dole instead of going back to working lives, even as he hits a solid point saying that the government needs to do better training those out of work to get them back into the workforce with relevant skills. So? His proposals to make the safety net stronger are...
   1. First, convert Medicaid into a state block grant program, rather than a defined benefit program. This allows for patients to choose what doctors to see, makes it attractive for doctors to take Medicaid (and give quality care to Medicaid patients) again, frees states from the oppresive grip of Washington, D.C., and will save money over the long term. What he's not telling you is that a block grant program makes it so that Washington always determines how much is spent on Medicaid at any given time and forces the people who need it to have to fight each other for a supply of money that is unlikely to be enough to get everyone the care they need. So, far from freeing states from the oppressive grip of Washington, it actually ensures that states will forever have to deal with Washington's whims to see whether they get any funding at all. If Mr. Ryan is complaining about low reimbursement rates and the substandard care that "government rationing" casuses now, wait until we're on the Ryan Medicaid plan, which formalizes and creates actual government rationing.
   2. Second, convert the Supplemental Nutritional Aid Progamme (SNAP), also known as food stamps, into a block grant program, indexed to inflation, and make SNAP, Section 8, and other federal rent assistance programs carry time limits and extra burdens about looking for work or job training so as to discourage people from licing a life on welfare. Thats right, the lazy people canard is back again - the people on those assistance programs are not kicking back and letting the checks roll in, living a lifestyle of luxury thanks to the government. Mr. Ryan would like them to feel even more pinched on their assistance through block grants and for them to receive as many messages of "Shame on you for needing assistance. Be humiliated and scarlet-lettered and even more harried jumping through hoops to make us feel satisfied that you're not actually having a moment's peace while you're on assistance."
   3. Third, cut funding for Pell Grants, ostensibly to stop tuition inflation, kill job-training programs and replace them with scholarships, and make the vouchers program of Washington D.C. return. So...cut higher education funding, transform actual programs into voucher scholarships, and then give more money to voucher programs? Sounds like Mr. Ryan has a problem with the public education system and would like poor parents to have to compete with each other for a dwindling amount of resources for ways of getting them out of poverty. We thought he wanted to get people off the dole instead of creating conditions that will likely keep them on it. That said, his idea of tracking benefits and job training programs to see whether programs are working is a good idea. We can only hope that they see that things dont't work because there isn't enough, not because there's too much.
   4. Fourth, Medicare is converted to a "pick your plan" for the young, and a coupon/subsidy is given to defray the costs associated with those plans. Medical liability lawsuits have their damages capped, and reimbursement rates go up, and any savings garnered are used to sustain the program. If it wasn't for the "let's replace the government guaranteed-benefit program with a coupon and a list of sharks, err, insurance companies to choose from", those reforms would at least be sensible. Mr. Ryan, however, wants to make it so that the most expensive group has to deal with rising health care costs on their own, as I doubt subsidies will ever be what they need to be. (Not to mention, his party doesn't particularly like subsidies to the poor or anyone who might support a liberal. If converted, I can see the subsidy rates becoming a political football easily.) Sure, he gets savings, but probably at the cost of lives, livelihoods, and what little income the retired have.
   5. Fifth, require that Social Security's trust fund always have enough money to fund its liabilities, and force everyone to negotiate how to get back to that point should available funds dip below that amount. Yeah, we got nothing on that one.
   
   Mr. Ryan takes the opportunity in this dead segment to remind us that any solution that involves raising taxes to cover the shortfalls is doomed to failure, because raising taxes always hurts the economy, period. And if left untouched, entitlements will force both drastic cuts and painful tax increases at the end of the line. So...why not spread that pain out to now, when we can afford it, incrememntally, through smart cuts and tax increases, so as to avoid the sharp stop at the end? As if anticipated, the next section involves tax reform.


3. Pro-Growth Tax Reform is the next point of attack, contending that a properly pro-growth tax policy should be simple, efficient, and fair. We'll see how it holds up when it gets to the proposals:
   1. Reject tax increases and try to keep revenue as a percentage of GDP dead on the Laffer curve. Mr. Ryan can surely do better than just point at the historical record, say "That's what we normally get. that's what it should stay at." and consider the point won, but that's his argument, until the very end, where he says that this should happen because the American people have had to suffer from having their incomes reduced, so the government should also have to suffer the same fate. A very underwhelming start to what should be a signature piece, Mr. Ryan - it would be better for you to make a case as to why this number should be.
   2. Cut the top individual tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent and consolidate the tax brackets. Yet another thing that proves Mr. Ryan's not serious about wanting to balance the budget - he wants to cut revenue collection from the people who have the most revenue to collect from. If he thinks that the rich will suddenly start paying their taxes because they have a lower rate, then he's deluding himself. (Instad, he just spouts boilerplate conservativsm that says lower taxes always translates to a better economy - that's nice, but it only affects revenues if those new economic outputs actually pay taxes, which the rich will still be trying to dodge. Now, Mr. Ryan does sensibly say the tax code needs revision and to have many of its loopholes, exceptions, and carve-outs eliminated enirely. I don't know if we'd agree o nwhat actually needs to be eliminated, but simpler and more efficient would certainly result from lessening the amount of ways to escape paying taxes. Now all it needs is to be fair - which lowering rate on the top tax payers would not be. Fair would be turning regressive taxes into progressive taxes, and designing the code such that the people who have the most are actually the ones paying the most in taxes.
   3. Cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent and remove loopholes and exceptions that allow corporatoins to pay no taxes or get subsidies from the government. Another nonsensible tax rate reduction paired with a very sensible "stop them from squirreling their money away in such a way that they pay no taxes on their giant profits. I'd like to see some of the details when we get to that point myself, to see whether or not he's actually serious about ending subsidies and loopholes from corporations, or whether he wants to only end those ones that benefit the people who fund his opponents.

And then, there's the health care bill, which gets special treatment all throughout the plan.

1. Restraining the growth of government. Mr. Ryan, as a Republican, is fundamentally against the government doing anything that restrictcs the freedoms of its citizens. Unless, of course, those citizens are women or poor. However, for this particular segment, Mr. Ryan swears his allegiance to the Tea Party, and says that patients deserve to have more control and choice over their health care, instead of having "government bureaucrats" take control of the health care and ration it. You know, "Death Panels" and the like. Given the choice between the predatory private market and the government, though, we'd bet the government could win the argument, considring we see so many successful socialized medicien programs in other countries. Mr. Ryan is insistent, however, that each person should be required to wade the maze of private insurance, assuming they can afford it, because they deserve to have that freedom, instead of being assured that when they get sick, someone will see then and it won't bankrupt them. He also believes that government care will reduce innovation, because if private companies don't compete for profit, then what sort of incentive will they have to develop new treatments and research?
2. Medicaid gets fixed by repealing the health care law...by not putting lots of people on Medicaid. And then Mr. Ryan details all the reasons why he believes Medicaid is a broken system, which mostly involves "too many people on it, too little reimbursement rates, and too much spent on it", all of which could be fixed without scrapping the program.
3. Repealing the health-care law saves jobs and stops tax hikes. Mr. Ryan, as a Republican, also fundamentally believes that increasing taxes on anyone damages the economy irreperably, and especially so if the persons being taxed are corporations. So any increase in taxes on corporations automatically meeans less people hired. Any additional taxes on wages or investment income makes it worse for workers, even if the result ends up making them and their employers pay less in terms of insurances and health care costs. Taxes bad, full stop. Even if what you get from those taxes is worth far more than what you pay in.

Now that I look at it, the health care bill only seems to be getting special treatment because the Republicans really didn't like it and it was a major part of the accomplishments of the President and the Demcoratic Congress. There's almost no refutation of the bill itself or its benefits, just talking points about "rationed care" (already real), "freedom" (to be fleeced by one or another private corporation), and taxes (which, despite the Tea Party's blindness to infrastructure, often return benefits far in excess of their fees when doen properly.) For a budget and a policy document, this entire item seems very lacking in fixing the budget in a sustainable, logical way. It's very partisan, but wrapped in the guise of non-partisanship. When they decide to do something serious, and to let us see the numbers in a more detailed way, then we'll talk about a budget proposal. This? Needs work.

That leaves us with only the conclusion to go. After reiterating how his plan is superior to the President's plan in terms of eventual surpluses of revenues and sustainability of spending on everything, Mr. Ryan yields the floor to the Heritage Foundation's analysis of his plan, so that if his conservative backers weren't convinced of his bona fides, he can say, "See? One of the most conservative organizations in the country endorses my plan and says it does exactly what it's supposed to." And it lets him claim even greater rewards, because the analysis is dynamic and takes into account an assumed snowball effect of good things coming from the plan.

In response to this, The President gave his remarks on his own budget and why he thinks the Ryan plan does things the wrong way, benefiting the rich at the expense of the middle class, the poor, and the aged and disabled. For some conservative columnists, simply quoting back what the President said is considered sufficient argument that he lost the debate, because of all the things Everyone Knows simply aren't true when he says them. To others, comparisons to the Great Saint Reagan and other previous presidents should make it abundantly clear that the Obama Way is the way of economic doom, even though there's some serious apples/oranges problems involved. Selective choices of examples and invoking a simplistic model will also earn you no friends nor respect, but claiming the President said a lot of things that mean nothing will get you on the waiting list to a conservative event, at least, and saying that the GOP needs to stay focused on the Big Picture will get you in the good graces of the conservative movement. However, if you really want an in, you have to accuse the President of being an Alinsky Marxist in moderate's clothing, setting up ideological straw men to knock down and punting on all the really important issues, like whether you want rugged individualism that will destroy you if you happen to make a misstep somewhere and you haven't already established a good network of people that will help you out or you want NANNY STATE SOCIALISM, where you can't breathe without the permission of the government and your hard-earned cash will be stolen in taxes and given to the worthless, the unemployed, and welfare queens. If you can wield that rhetorical club, you'll have the skeleton key to get anywhere you want in the conservative movement.

If, instead, you wish to earn the respect and admiration of the people as someone who might have a clue, you would do well to follow Mr. Wolf's example and paint a complex picture of the economy that has good indicators and bad, all at once, and to admit you don't know which indicators are the right ones to be paying attention to.

In the end, the budget passed the House on a mostly party-line vote. And thus, one can move on to the next big issues, like the debt ceiling, while waiting to see whether the Ryan plan stalls out in the Senate.