Colorado GOP candidate for Congress Cory Gardner was selected one of the National Republican Congressional Committee’s “Young Gun” candidates in July. The NRCC program provides fundraising and strategy assistance. It will also now be tied to that highly touted innovative and bold but really flim-flamming sham of a plan called the “Roadmap for America’s Future” presented by Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan because, as Steve Benan pointed out yesterday, Ryan’s bad idea has been included in the new paperback manifesto called “Young Guns” authored by Ryan as well as Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Chief Deputy Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). The book includes Ryan’s Roadmap along with other of the main GOP ideas promoted over the last year and it is being published by Cantor’s political action committee. In other words, it is time to put the question point blank to Republicans in Congress or running for Congress like Cory Gardner: Is the Ryan Roadmap the official position of the Republican Conference? It’s a yes or no question, the answer to which should be met with a calculator.
Here’s what Paul Krugman, working with numbers run by the Tax Policy Center, makes of the Roadmap:
The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center… indicates that the Ryan plan would reduce revenue by almost $4 trillion over the next decade. If you add these revenue losses to the numbers [The Washington Post cites in reporting on the Roadmap], you get a much larger deficit in 2020, roughly $1.3 trillion.
And that’s about the same as the budget office’s estimate of the 2020 deficit under the Obama administration’s plans. That is, Mr. Ryan may speak about the deficit in apocalyptic terms, but even if you believe that his proposed spending cuts are feasible — which you shouldn’t — the Roadmap wouldn’t reduce the deficit. All it would do is cut benefits for the middle class while slashing taxes on the rich.
And I do mean slash. The Tax Policy Center finds that the Ryan plan would cut taxes on the richest 1 percent of the population in half, giving them 117 percent of the plan’s total tax cuts. That’s not a misprint. Even as it slashed taxes at the top, the plan would raise taxes for 95 percent of the population.
Here’s the over-the-top video that includes a sun-dappled 47-year-old Cantor as one of the GOP’s “young guns.” Gardner appears in the video in the upper right-hand corner of the montage sequence featuring the “commonsense conservative candidates” who are nevertheless apparently backing the radical math-challenged Ryan Roadmap.
Comments are closed.