Ryan Roundup 2013: Everything You Need to Know About Chairman Ryan's Latest Budget

Below is a compilation of the CBPP analyses and blog posts on House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget, which the House has passed.

Overview/General

• Blog Post: Ryan Budget Hits Non-Defense Discretionary Funding Far More Than Sequestration Does
  March 14, 2013
  House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s new budget would cut the part of the budget that supports everything from education and law enforcement to biomedical research to nutrition assistance by more than $1 trillion below the funding caps in the 2011 Budget Control Act (BCA) over the next decade.  That’s hundreds of billions of dollars below the funding levels that would result from nine years of sequestration.
   
• Analysis: Ryan Budget Understates Defense Spending by $100 Billion
  March 19, 2013
  The Ryan budget understates defense spending by $100 billion over the next ten years.  It claims $100 billion in defense savings that, in reality, would not materialize because they are flatly inconsistent with Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates of the amount of defense spending that would result from the amount of defense funding the budget contains.  This is politically significant:  without these phantom savings, the Ryan budget does not achieve balance in any of the next ten years.

Safety Net

• Blog post:  Two-Thirds of Ryan’s Cuts Would Come from Low- and Moderate-Income Programs
  March 15, 2013
  At least 66 percent of the cuts in House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s new budget would come from programs that serve people of limited means, our new analysis finds.  That violates a core principle of the Simpson-Bowles fiscal commission, which the commission co-chairs reiterated in the revised plan they issued a few weeks ago:  that deficit reduction should not increase poverty or widen inequality.
   
  • Analysis: Chairman Ryan Gets 66 Percent of His Budget Cuts from Programs for People With Low or Moderate Incomes


• Blog post:  Ryan Budget’s SNAP Cuts Even Deeper Than We Thought
  March 19, 2013
  New information from the House Budget Committee shows that Chairman Ryan’s planned cuts in SNAP (formerly food stamps) are even more draconian than we originally thought.The report clarifies that the Ryan budget’s proposed conversion of SNAP to a block grant — which accounts for $125 billion of the budget’s $135 billion in SNAP cuts over the next decade — wouldn’t take effect until 2019.  As a result, all $125 billion of those cuts would occur over just five years.  The kinds of changes this would require are extraordinary.
   
  • Analysis: Ryan Budget Would Slash SNAP Funding By $135 Billion Over Ten Years:  Low-Income Households in All States Would Feel Sharp Effects

Taxes

• Blog post:  The Ryan Budget’s Skewed Tax Cuts
  March 20, 2013
  We’ve shown that the $5 trillion in non-defense program cuts in House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s new budget are heavily weighted toward low-income programs.  At the same time, based on the latest estimates from the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center (TPC), we now see that the tax cuts that he specified in his budget would be heavily weighted to high-income households.
   
• Analysis: The Ryan Budget’s Tax Cuts: Nearly $6 Trillion in Cost and No Plausible Way to Pay for It: New Tax Policy Center Estimates Show $5.7 Trillion Revenue Loss
  March 17, 2013
  The new budget from House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan proposes a series of dramatic tax cuts that would cost nearly $6 trillion in lost federal revenue over the next decade, and that would provide the lion’s share of their benefits to high-income households and corporations. But, despite its stated promise to the contrary, the budget does not include a plausible way to pay for it all.

Health Care

• Analysis: Medicare in Ryan’s 2014 Budget
   

• Blog post:  Ryan Budget Again Includes a Medicaid Block Grant That Would Add Millions to the Ranks of the Uninsured and Underinsured
  March 15, 2013
  House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s new budget again proposes to radically restructure Medicaid by converting it into a block grant and slash federal Medicaid funding by $810 billion over the next decade.  He would also repeal health reform’s Medicaid expansion.  All told, it would add tens of millions of Americans to the ranks of the uninsured and underinsured.
   
  • Analyis: Ryan Block Grant Proposal Would Cut Medicaid by Nearly One-Third by 2023 and More After That
     
• Blog post: Refuting, Once Again, the Medicare Part D Myth
  March 11, 2013
  When House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan unveils his budget plan this week, he almost certainly will again propose to convert Medicare into a “premium support” system, where beneficiaries would receive a voucher to buy private coverage or traditional Medicare.  He may also repeat the frequent claim that the Medicare drug benefit’s lower-than-expected spending reflects efficiencies produced by competition among private insurers — and thus supports his proposal.  So, while we showed in a 2012 report why this claim is incorrect, it’s worth doing so once again.

The Economy

• Blog post: Yes, the Ryan Budget Is Contractionary
  March 14, 2013
  If enacted, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget would slow the economic recovery.  Chairman Ryan selectively uses Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis to argue that his budget offers long-term economic benefits, while dismissing CBO’s finding — in the very same report — that austerity measures like those that he proposes would take a costly toll on the economy over the next few years and could put the recovery at risk.