Budget-Cutter Not Entirely Clear How He Plans To Cut Budget

Budget-Cutter Paul Ryan Still Not Entirely Clear How He Plans To Cut The Budget

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the incoming chairman of the House Budget Committee, has generally been held out to be some genius solutioneer-in-waiting. And it seems to hardly matter a whit to anyone that his plans to cut taxes and rein in spending would raise taxes on most Americans and blow out the budget deficit. Ryan is handsome and personable and can talk in complete sentences, and these facts alone pretty much put him in the upper percentile of talent in just about any House of Representatives.

But we're still waiting for Ryan to sort of deliver on the hype, so I'm somewhat sympathetic to the frustrations felt by Matt Finkelstein, writing up this encounter between Ryan and Meredith Vieira for Political Correction:

MEREDITH VIEIRA (HOST): You say discretionary spending -- give me specifics. Where are you going to cut? Are you gonna cut transportation, education, Medicare -- what are you going to cut?

RYAN: That is what is gonna happen in the appropriations process down the road. So I can't tell you the answer to that because, as a budget committee person, we simply lower the cap and then those things go down. We're gonna be reducing all domestic discretionary spending. I can't tell you by what amount and which program, but all of it is going to be going down, and the aggregate amount will be back to 2008 levels before the spending binge occurred.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/0 ... 04948.html


"Trust me... It's [somehow] going to go down..."

So he doesn't know specifics becuase it's an incredibly large task - but the idea going in is to cut, cut, cut. At least he's flexible enough to negotiate with the committee members on where the cuts need to occur.

Are you saying that having him wait to make any decisions until he listens to others on the committee is a bad thing?

Ryan has outlined his specific plans if Meridith actually wanted to know the answer...she didn't, she just wanted to make a public point to her audience on a topic that requires much more than sound bites.

Heritage has done an abstract on his plan, for those interested.

http://heritage.org/Research/Reports/20 ... ts-Critics

Or you can go right to his site and see exactly what his roadmap plan is...
http://www.roadmap.republicans.budget.h ... utions.htm

He has a plan...whether or not the republicans get wimpy and won't do anything is another guess. It is up to those of us who put them in to hold them accountable to do so.

By the way, doesn't it make sense, if you want to reduce spending to first set a cap of where everything must live beneath? That is how I do my own budget. I don't start by addressing individual items, I set my total budget, they go down the line and make the decisions on where to spend the $$

Do you not agree with cutting spending LJ?

Only if it's combined with raising revenue; i.e., taxing the richest 2% to bring the deficit down; closing tax-loopholes for corporations hiding their funds off-shore; rewarding companies for sending their jobs overseas. You can NOT balance the budget on tax-cuts alone. In spite of the drivel from the Rightie-blogs, American corporations are NOT "over-taxed."

The American corporate tax rate is the second highest after Japan's.

Need to cut the expansive growth of goverment over the last couple decades, including the military.

SS109 wrote: The American corporate tax rate is the second highest after Japan's.

Need to cut the expansive growth of goverment over the last couple decades, including the military.

Japan just lowered their rate, we are now the highest. :woo hoo:

Of course, the fallacy in all of this is the "tax rates" in NO WAY reflect how much the corporations actually pay. Any corporation with a second-year law student can find 1,000 ways to ensure that the company doesn't actually pay that--if anything at all...

Let's take for example, Koch Industries:

Tax Breaks for Koch Industries?

In the Republican’s new “Pledge To America” they say:

We will allow small business owners to take a tax deduction equal to 20 percent of their business income.

However, there are two common forms of “small business” that doesn’t pay any taxes already. Instead, in Subchapter S corporations and Limited Liability Companies and Partnerships (LLCs), the profits from the companies are “passed through” to the owners, who pay personal taxes on the profits.

So here’s the interesting catch. You’re read about Koch Industries and their billionaire owners the Koch brothers, who are spending hundreds of millions of dollars waging a war against Obama. Well, wouldn’t you know it, Koch Industries is organized as an LLC. So are other large companies, like Bechtel, the huge construction company. So the Republicans are giving a 20% tax break to the Koch Brothers, a tax break almost certainly worth even more than the money they are spending on Republican causes. Who would have thought that throwing money at Republicans would be such a good business investment!

http://politicalirony.com/2010/09/24/ta ... ndustries/

What a crock.

Koch Industries is quite obviously a conglomerate of smaller firms, and the smaller firms are structured in a number of different ways, including limited liability companies (LLCs) and partnerships. And the structure of each of Koch Industries’ subsidiary entities is public information, filed with the states in which each entity organized. Oh, and this information is right there on their damned web site, if you care to poke around at Koch’s businesses’ home pages.

LLCs and partnerships in particular don’t pay corporate taxes. There’s no rocket science here, no digging through IRS filings required to determine this.

Any wet-behind-the-ears second-year business school student could tell you that LLCs and partnerships don’t pay corporate income tax. Income is instead passed through to the owners of these entities, and the owners pay personal income tax.

At least they pay personal income tax when there’s a profit — and any third-year business student will tell you how to ensure there’s no profit.

(And they’d certainly be able to tell you why an LLC is preferable to a partnership; liability is limited to the assets held by the corporation, unlike partnerships, and corporations can live forever if set up properly.)

What’s disturbing about these two articles is a lack of pushback by the journalist; why didn’t they question the complaints of the senators? why didn’t they push Koch Industries a little harder, when they replied indignantly that they paid their taxes; did they not think to ask what kind and how much tax Koch paid?

And why didn’t the senators — the men responsible for making laws related to the establishment and regulation of corporations — know that Koch Industries is no different than an overwhelming number of businesses here in the U.S. with regards to their tax payments?

http://my.firedoglake.com/rayne/2010/10 ... s-privacy/


Yeah, my heart is really bleeding over the amount of taxes that the large corporations actually pay. They move their profits off-shore, and pull their liabilities, expenses & debts on-shore, and most of the larger ones don't pay any taxes at all... :bash

John Boehner Interview: House Speaker Fumbles Budget Cuts Question

Asked to name a specific program that could be trimmed from the fiscal plan, Boehner responded, "I don't think I have one off the top of my head." However, the newly-minted speaker added, "There is no part of this government that should be sacred."

Wow... Even Boehner doesn't know... I guess they'll have pass them to find out what's in them.... rofllol

You libs left the new republicans a mess, sure it will time..