Republican Death Panels Are Real: If You Are Not Filthy Rich, You Will Die In the Street

Ignore the shutdown kabuki over what's left of the 2011 budget - the real fight over the 2012 budget is just starting, and the theme is clear: if you're not filthy rich, report to your neighborhood "Killing Social Security to Save It" euthanasia station immediately.

The Ryan Plan is far worse than we imagined: so bad, in fact, that it might let the only-slighly-less-horrible Bowles-Simpson Cat Food Commission plan slide through.

Don't fall into this trap. Both Ryan and Cat Food are expressways to a serfs-and-Lords economy, so far over the Reichwingnut cliff they cannot be seen from Reality World.

Reality demands massive tax hikes on the rich and corporations, massive spending on infrastructure to create 10 million jobs, massively tough re-regulation of Wall Street, Big Oil/Coal/industry, and telling the Deficit Crybabies and Austerity Vultures to fuck off and die.

Don't believe it's that bad? Read it for yourself.

Here's Steve Benen on Tuesday:

RYAN'S RADICAL, RIDICULOUS, RIP-OFF ROADMAP.... While the process of crafting a budget plan for this fiscal year implodes under the weight of GOP intransigence, today also happens to be the day next year's budget fight begins in earnest. And if you think the current fight is a mess, prepare to have Republicans take your breath away.

And if you're a disabled senior on Medicaid, relying on an oxygen tank, that expression should probably be taken literally.

Today, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) unveils his plan for fiscal year 2012. He promised a truly radical approach to our entire system of government, and he wasn't lying -- Ryan's budget is based on his radical "roadmap" and effectively rewrites the American social contract.

Medicare would be eliminated and replaced with a voucher system. Medicaid would be gutted and sent to the states as a block grant. The Affordable Care Act would be scrapped, tax rates on corporations and the wealthy would be slashed, and all told, Ryan's plan intends to slash roughly $6 trillion from the federal budget over the next 10 years.

This is madness.

Think he’s exaggerating? From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

The Ryan Budget's Radical Priorities

Provides Largest Tax Cuts in History for Wealthy, Raises Middle Class Taxes, Ends Guaranteed Medicare, Privatizes Social Security, Erodes Health Care

Kevin drum nails it:

A plan dedicated almost entirely to slashing social spending in a country that's already the stingiest spender in the developed world, while simultaneously cutting taxes on the rich in a country with the lowest tax rates in the developed world — well, what could be more serious than that?

I think I'm going to be sick.

Steve M. refers us to this:

Booman Tribune's Steven D and his wife are also just under 55, though a lot less fortunate in matters of health than my wife and I have been. Read Steven's heartbreaking post to learn what's really going to happen to a lot of people if Ryanomics prevails.

But it will eliminate the deficit and slash the debt! Sadly, no:

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office's initial analysis of the House GOP budget released today by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is filled with nuggets of bad news for Republicans.

In addition to acknowledging that seniors, disabled and elderly people would be hit with much higher out-of-pocket health care costs, the CBO finds that by the end of the 10-year budget window, public debt will actually be higher than it would be if the GOP just did nothing.

Here's Kevin Drum on how Ryan is the polar opposite of "courageous."

In case you needed yet more proof that Ryan-style budget austerity kills economies, Zandar has it.

And no, of course the dems and the White House won’t accept it. They will, however, use Ryan’s extremism to make everybody lap up Simpson-Bowles cat food and love it.

Digby:

With all that reasonableness and thoughtfulness, It's hard to recall that the Fiscal Commission non-report was a trainwreck. It's only by comparison to the Von Ryan Express that they are able to portray it as moderate middle ground. If I were a conspiracy type, I might even think the catfood salesmen on the commission cooked this whole thing up sometime last December when it was obvious that the liberals weren't going to sign on. But I'm not a conspiracy type so I'd imagine that this is just something they all fortuitously and individually stumbled into on their way to a big donor meeting. There doesn't have to be a conspiracy --- it's just part of the culture. Look at how the Village greeted Ryan today. Cleopatra would be jealous.

Anything that will screw average folks and reward rich ones is automatically very, very "serious." They love being serious. And if it happened to benefit their benefactors well --- sometimes life really is fair.

If the Democrats don't take this plan and wrap it around every teabagging Republican in the congress in the fall of 2012 they don't deserve to win. Just on a purely primitive political basis, whether they secretly love the idea of death panels or not, their competitive spirit alone should be enough to make Paul Ryan and his cronies the poster boys for Soylent Green and decouple them from the aging baby boomers until we've all shuffled off our mortal coil.

From this moment on, the Democrats have the opportunity to reclaim their position as the party trusted by senior citizens. Over the next 15 years a gigantic number of them are going into the system --- and they vote. If the Republicans don't have them, they have nothing. (You know how badly they fare among younger people and racial and ethnic minorities.)

There should be a price to be paid for the kind of heartless abstraction we are seeing from the wealthy mandarins and starry-eyed Randians who are running things these days. The seniors are the ones who can make them pay it.

Steven Benen gets the last word:

Those in the media who are gushing over this plan as if it has something to do with fiscal responsibility aren't just wrong, they're missing the point on a fundamental level.

It matters that this budget plan's numbers don't add up. It matters that it would hurt working families that need help, deliberately targeting low-income Americans. It matters that Medicare would no longer exist if this proposal was somehow approved.

But as the debate gets underway in earnest, what really matters is getting observers to understand what we're fighting about. Congressional Republicans don't care about the deficit; they care about shrinking government to a size in which they can drown it in the bathtub, satisfying an ideological dream.