I'll make another attempt at discussing Paul Ryan's budget

brideymcbriderson

Since my last one was a bust.

Look!  Some charts! 

Ezra Klein: The Ryan budget's priorities in two graphs

The tax side:

Note that Ryan has said he supports closing various tax breaks and loopholes in order to offset some of the costs of his tax cuts. Those changes aren?t included here because, as of yet, he hasn?t said what they will be. But it?s at least possible that they could change the distribution of his cuts. That said, the spending side of his proposal is quite detailed. Here?s where his cuts fall: This is actually somewhat less regressive than Ryan?s previous budget, which the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated found 65 percent of its spending cuts in programs for low-income Americans. There are, sadly, no graphs for the budget released by congressional Democrats, as they haven?t actually released a budget.

ESF1

All I have to say about this can be summed up here.

 

Y4M

Thoughts based on the charts:

-Tax cuts can't really help people who don't pay taxes.  So of course people who pay the most taxes see the most change when tax rates go down.

-To interpret the second chart, you have to know what percentage of spending (or cuttable-spending) goes toward low income programs.  If 80% of discretionary type spending goes to low income programs, and 62% of his cuts come from there, then he did pretty well.  If we spend more like 40% on those, and he found 62% of cuts there, that's worse.  I honestly don't know the percentages. 

3.27.04_Helper

what is wrong with Simpson Bowles?

Why is does Ryan's budget call for increased military spending? I thought we were entering a period of reduced spending since we are winding down the wars?

brideymcbriderson

Y4M:

-To interpret the second chart, you have to know what percentage of spending (or cuttable-spending) goes toward low income programs.  If 80% of discretionary type spending goes to low income programs, and 62% of his cuts come from there, then he did pretty well.  If we spend more like 40% on those, and he found 62% of cuts there, that's worse.  I honestly don't know the percentages. 

Good point.  But given the enormous amount of our budget that is spent on defense, Medicare, and Social Security, I'm guessing that 40% of the budget doesn't go to low-income programs.  Unless Medicare and Social Security are considered low-income programs by these figures.

brideymcbriderson

According to this chart on the always-reliable Wikipedia, 62% of the budget is military, social security and Medicare/Medicaid.  I'll assume that Medicaid takes up half of the 23% that those two programs represent (although I would assume Medicare actually takes up much more than half), and you have 42.5% of the budget being taken up by Medicaid, "other mandatory" and "discretionary."