As Romney tours the storm damage, it’s worth notingthat government-funded levees prevented far greater damage from occurring in New Orleans, seven years after the city was battered (and the levees failed) during Hurricane Katrina: Isaac’s whistling winds lashed this city and the storm dumped nearly a foot of rain on its desolate streets, but the system…
Tag: budget
REPORT: Seniors Will Pay $60,000 More For Medicare Under Romney/Ryan Plan
The Romney/Ryan proposal to transform Medicare’s guaranteed benefit into a “premium support” structure for future retirees could increase costs by almost $60,000 for seniors reaching the age of 65 in 2023, a new report from the Center for American Progress finds. Current seniors would also have to pay more for preventive, hospital, and physician services…
GOP team is wrong prescription for patients
One major concern for me and every American is the future of our nation’s health care system. The quality of that system affects us all, and we need details about the candidates’ approach to health care, not high-level talking points. I write this as a lifelong Republican and registered nurse. The foremost priority for me…
Paul Ryan: The Man Who Wasnt There
Judged by the entirety of his career, Ryan is merely a good-looking version of a typical Obama-era Republican. He calls for budgetary discipline while exploding the deficit. He speaks of lowering taxes but merely shifts the burden to the middle class. Back in the Bush administration, he rarely met a boondoggle he didn’t embrace. On…
Poll: Majority Of Voters Say Medicare Needs Only Minor Changes Or None At All
A new round of polls finds that although voters have a slightly favorable view of GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s pick for vice president, running mate Paul Ryan’s Medicare plans are viewed with a greater degree of skepticism. The Wall Street Journal: In Tight Race, Romney Faces Hurdles At a time when the campaign has…
FAQ: Decoding The $716 Billion In Medicare Reductions
The structure and financing of Medicare, the federal health insurance program that serves seniors and the disabled, has become a defining issue in the presidential and congressional campaigns since GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney picked as his running mate Rep. Paul Ryan. KHN’s Mary Agnes Carey answers some frequently asked questions about the numbers and…
White House Kills $473 Million in Earmarks
President Barack Obama’s administration eliminated $473 million in old transportation earmarks today, telling states to reallocate the money by the end of the year or lose it for good. Old earmarks for projects that have not yet been built, from fiscal years 2003 to 2006, have been effectively nixed. Appropriations bills for those years contained…
Five Budget Questions Mitt Romney Needs To Answer Now That Paul Ryan Is On The Ticket
Now that Mitt Romney has selected Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) to be his running mate, Ryan’s budget plan moves to the center of the presidential campaign. Ryan’s budget is a near-pure distillation of right-wing economic ideology. It would slash basic economic investments, end the Medicare guarantee, decimate the social safety-net, and dramatically cut taxes for…
Romney’s budget plan is a fantasy
Consider what Romney has promised. By 2016, he says federal spending will be below 20 percent of GDP, and at least 4 percent of that will be defense spending. At that point, he will cap federal spending at 20 percent of GDP, meaning it can never rise above that level. All that’s hard enough. Romney…
Timeline: Cutting Poverty and the Federal Deficit Is Possible
Our nation unequivocally boasts the resources to dramatically cut poverty while simultaneously cutting the federal government’s long-term deficit. Unfortunately, too many of our political leaders put these two goals at odds, arguing that the way to stabilize our fiscal outlook is to hand the bill to middle- and low-income Americans. The House Republican leadership, for…
Paul Ryan’s Tax Plan Would Slash Mitt Romney’s Tax Rate to 1 Percent
The tax plan proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.), the newly minted GOP vice presidential candidate, would have slashed Mitt Romney’s effective tax rate to about 1 percent in 2010, based on Romney’s tax return that year, according to a Roll Call analysis. The Ryan tax cut, which would shave about 90 percent off of…
FAQ: How Paul Ryan Proposes To Change Medicare
Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan, GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s choice for vice president, has provoked consternation from Democrats and anxiety among some congressional Republicans with his proposals to reshape Medicare. The Republican-controlled House, along party lines, twice approved his proposals to overhaul the popular social insurance program for the elderly and disabled by giving beneficiaries…
Romney Struggles To Distinguish His Economic Policies From Bush’s
Mitt Romney couldn’t substantially distinguish his economic policies from former President George W. Bush’s during an interview with NBC’s Brian Williams on Wednesday, saying only that he would “take action to get America on track to have a balanced budget.” Bush increased the national debt by trillions of dollars. Rather than detailing specific differences with…
CBO Confirms: The Health Care Law Reduces the Deficit
This afternoon, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its latest look at the Affordable Care Act – the health care law. This report affirms that repealing the health care law would deny tax credits for millions of middle class families and result in higher deficits and fewer Americans with insurance. Once again, the Congressional Budget…
Our Broken Political System
Elected politicians would, at least theoretically, be expected to either represent such views or at least respond to them. But you can forget about that. On occasion, democratic pressure can build on representatives to either change a position or lose their jobs, making life sufficiently uncomfortable for them. But this is rarer than a red…
GOP governors say Medicaid costs are already breaking states’ backs. Are they right?
The Republican governors vowing to opt out of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion argue the program is already burdening cash-strapped state governments and would be a poison pill for state budgets in the long run. Are they right? When you look at all spending on state programs—including money from both federal and state governments—Medicaid is the single…
Obama Fires Back On Spending Accusations : NPR [transcript]
DAVID GREENE, HOST: Lets stay with money and politics. On the campaign trail, President Obama and Mitt Romney have been feuding recently over the deficit. At issue is just how to characterize the Obama administrations record on spending. Depending on who you listen to, the president is either an out of control spender or hes…
House and Senate Unanimously Reject Obama Budgets — Or Do They?
While the Sessions and Mulvaney bills put forward the same topline numbers as those in the president’s budget, neither offered any specifics. The Sessions legislation was 56 pages long; actual budgets are closer to 2,000 pages long. Thus, a White House official said, the Sessions proposal was a “shell that could be filled with a…
Debt Ceiling Debate Is Revived In Washington[audio]
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner warned on Tuesday that the U.S. will likely hit its debt limit sometime before the end of the year. At the same event in Washington, House Speaker John Boehner promised that any increase in the nation’s debt ceiling would have to be accompanied by corresponding budget reductions. SOURCE: Debt Ceiling Debate…
Paul Ryan Suggests We Need To Shred America’s Safety Net Because Rich People Give Politicians Money
“Every other country in the world calls it bribery. We call it campaign financing.” “That’s BS,” a constituent told Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) during a town hall Friday. “I don’t think you or any of the rest of the politicians want to fix” it, the Wisconsinite declared as the crowd roared with applause. Ryan, however,…