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Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Is the Ryan Plan a Serious Budget Proposal?

I will give credit where credit is due in the Paul Ryan did lay out a proposal that does indeed tackle, whether one agrees with it or not, the problem of runaway Medicare spending. Eventually, Medicare, as well as Medicaid, will render the federal budget unable to be balanced. However, the revenue side of the proposal is horridly lacking. Simply waving your hand about the amount of revenue that will be collected is a nice trick, but hardly one meriting serious attention. My short answer to the title of the post would be "No.".

Bruce Bartlett has some good thoughts on it as well.

I'm not sure that Obama's budget proposals will be any more serious in terms of actually truly proposing the changes of the magnitude that need to occur in order to balance the budget, but then again I am not entirely convinced that the budget needs balancing at this particular point. I'm reasonably convinced that the President will propose possibly a more balanced set of proposals, more along the lines of a "shared sacrifice", but my guess is that they will still be half-measures.

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