off the charts
POLICY INSIGHT
BEYOND THE NUMBERS
BEYOND THE NUMBERS
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) will reportedly begin to release the details of his new budget proposal on Wednesday. House Republicans have already announced their goal is to balance the budget in ten years, and some have assumed this will require even deeper cuts and more extreme policies than last year’s Ryan budget, which did not balance after a decade. But this misses an important point: last year’s Ryan budget already required deep cuts and extreme policies of historic proportions.
As I wrote after Ryan released his budget last year:
Medicaid and other low-income programs. Last year, Ryan called for extraordinary cuts in programs that serve as a lifeline for our nation’s poorest and most vulnerable citizens, with at least 62 percent of its budget cuts over ten years coming from programs serving people of limited means. That approach violated a core principle of the Simpson-Bowles fiscal commission — that deficit reduction should not increase poverty or hardship — as well as basic principles of fairness. The Ryan budget would have:
The new Ryan budget is a remarkable document — one that, for most of the past half-century, would have been outside the bounds of mainstream discussion due to its extreme nature. In essence, this budget is Robin Hood in reverse — on steroids. It would likely produce the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history and likely increase poverty and inequality more than any other budget in recent times (and possibly in the nation’s history).
So, in assessing the budget that the Chairman will release this week, the issue is not whether it’s harsher than last year’s proposal but whether it continues to adhere to the same extreme approach that he has embraced in prior budgets. Here are some of the more disturbing aspects of last year’s budget:Image

- Radically restructured Medicaid by turning it into a block grant and slashing federal funding by more than one-third by 2022, as well as repealed health reform’s Medicaid expansion. All told, it would have added tens of millions of Americans to the ranks of the uninsured and underinsured.
- Cut SNAP (formerly known as food stamps) by over $130 billion; if the SNAP savings were achieved entirely through eligibility cuts, 8 to 10 million low-income people would have been knocked off the rolls.
- Sharply cut other low-income programs, such as Pell Grants, by tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. The budget documents showed that $758 billion in cuts would come from mandatory programs just in the income security portion of the budget, and the bulk of mandatory spending in that category goes for low-income programs.
Under Chairman Ryan’s budget, our nation would be a very different one — less fair and less generous, with an even wider gap between the very well-off and everyone else (especially between rich and poor) — and our society would be a coarser one.
That’s a yardstick that we should use in judging his new budget proposal.Stay up to date
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