House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R, WI) has laid out the Republican budget proposal for the decade beginning FY2015.
It begins by balancing the Federal budget over those 10 years, a measure of fiscal responsibility to which the present crop of Democrats don’t even pretend—vis., the Democrat-controlled Senate’s refusal even to produce a budget their first four years of the Obama administration, and which refusal they’ve renewed in the current year, insisting that they don’t need to bring up a budget anymore.
It repeals Obamacare, with that act’s enormous deficit-increasing costs.
It increases Defense spending, contra Democrat—White House—desires. Plussing up our military is an especially glaring need in this day of a resurgent Russia routinely invading and occupying parts of its neighbors—Georgia and Ukraine come to mind—and an equally aggressive, if more subtly so, People’s Republic of China and its territorial grabs of the East and South China Seas.
It renews the Republican proposal to give “premium subsidies” to senior citizens enrolling in Medicare beginning in 2024—folks today who are not older than 56—and letting them shop for their own insurance in a free(r) market, rather than being dragooned in to Medicare. Even so, Medicare would be one of their choices, and guaranteed to be no more than second least expensive. Democrats deride this as a voucher system and object to it. Aside from the fact that Democrats object to voucher systems in any form, I have to wonder why Democrats object so vociferously to older Americans making up their own minds, without the oversight of Democrat Betters.
It walks away from past practice of projecting budget effects into the future under the assumption that today’s conditions won’t change over the period being projected, including the premise that the economy won’t respond to spending changes by the Federal government—a static analysis—and makes use, instead, of the more realistic assumption that the economy does, in fact, respond to such inputs—dynamic analysis.
This is an outline that should be pursued, and Democrats who insist on continuing their profligate spending instead de-elected.