The Conservative Economic Vision

That's it in table form, direct from the official repug budget plan: Taking money from the middle-class to further enrich the already obscenely wealthy.

Kevin Drum summarizes:

I'd just like to quickly sum up what we now know about conservative Rep. Paul Ryan's "Roadmap for America’s Future":

• It raises taxes on 90% of Americans.
• It doesn't explain what spending it would cut.
• It doesn't eliminate the deficit.
  

And remember, this comes from the guy who's pretty much the best the GOP has to offer. Pretty impressive, no?

In more detail:

Rep. Paul Ryan's tax and spending "roadmap" is a fascinating critter: conservatives all praise it to the skies but none of them want to actually commit to supporting it. The reason for their hesitation is obvious: Ryan's plan would cut spending dramatically, and supporting it would mean having to explain what, exactly, they'd cut. That would be electoral suicide and they know it. They much prefer their usual game of loudly denouncing "spending" without ever having to say what spending they're actually opposed to.

However, their reason for supporting Ryan's plan is also obvious: it would cut taxes on the rich dramatically, and there's nothing conservatives like better than cutting the tax bills of America's wealthy. But how much would it cut taxes on the rich?

Citizens for Tax Justice has run the numbers and the answer is: a lot. The very richest of the rich would see their tax bills go down by an average of over $200,000, a whopping 15% of the income. Ka-ching! To make up for that, everyone with an income under $100,000 would have their taxes increased by about $2,000 per year.

It's a sweet deal for the rich. But even with all the tax increases on the middle class, Ryan's plan still raises less revenue than today's tax code. "It’s difficult to design a tax plan that will lose $2 trillion over a decade even while requiring 90 percent of taxpayers to pay more," says CTJ acerbically. "But Congressman Ryan has met that daunting challenge."

But the real horror is in the vision behind the plan, as Ted Frier expands on Jon Chait's terrifying analysis:

In place of those liberal public policies that for more than a century have tried to domesticate and humanize the untamed forces of a free market that accounts for both our economy's dynamism but also its destructiveness, Ryan and the Republicans would simply un-cage these forces to roam free about the countryside.

In doing so, the GOP's roadmap essentially codifies what Chait says is the coherent view of society sketched by Ayn Rand which glorifies selfishness, denies any basis for using public democratic power to reduce economic inequality, holds people completely responsible for their own destiny and fate, and concludes that whenever government tries to help all it really does is punish virtue and reward vice.

The core of the Randian worldview that Ryan and Republicans embrace, says Chait, is that only bad things happen when people (meaning the government) interfere with the "natural market distribution of income" that capitalism creates, meaning that the "central struggle of politics is to free the successful from having the fruits of their superiority redistributed by looters and moochers."

SNIP

What Ayn Rand and the Republicans who follow here want us to believe is that there is a class of super-achievers - the John Galts of the world -- who are responsible for everything that is good. And then there is us - we parasites, who live off of their beneficance and should be grateful every day for whatever jobs these super-achievers have created for us.

"Rand tapped into a latent elitism that had fallen into political disrepute but never disappeared from the economic right," said Chait, citing as evidence the prominent conservative Ludwig von Mises, who once confided to Rand: "You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your condition which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you."

The hilarious thing about the whole John Galt myth is that these supposed essential beings on whose Herculean shoulders the entire economy rests wouldn't last five seconds without trillions in government subsidies (agriculture, oil, gas, coal, Etc.), contracts (defense (Blackwater and Halliburton), homeland security, corrections, etc. ) and myriad other forms of corporate welfare. There's not a CEO on Wall Street who could support himself for a day in the minimum-wage, forced-labor ghetto the vast majority of Americans work through every day.

Nor do any of the corporate rich have an iota of personal responsibility that is not forced on them by government bureaucrats.

Anybody really think chemical companies would keep paying millions to prevent their shit from poisoning local water supplies if they were "freed" from those onerous regulations? That Walmart would test those Chinese toys for lead and refuse to sell them? That the helicopter-owning owner of your factory would pay taxes to keep the highways maintained? That public schools would teach anything other than blind obedience to our corporate masters?

Understand clearly the world conservatives want, and why they're lying to you about it.

Read both Frier's and Chait's pieces in full.