Erika1487
04-06-2011, 06:30 PM
Ok It is time to throw a Molotov cocktail at all the Democrats on the Board:)
Read it & weep hippies!
http://paulryan.house.gov/UploadedFiles/PathToProsperityFY2012.pdf
Our budget is very different. For starters, it cuts $6 trillion in spending from the President's budget over the next ten years, reduces the debt as a percentage of the economy, and puts the nation on a path to actually pay off our national debt. Our proposal brings federal spending back to 20 percent, consistent with the post-war average, and reduces deficits by $4.4 trillion.
Most important, our budget tackles the nation's biggest fiscal challenges head-on. It is a plan for job creation and growth today-a plan that ensures that our children inherit an America stronger, more prosperous, and more free-as past generations have sacrificed to ensure for us.
There are four major aspects of this budget's reform agenda:
•
First, this budget reforms government to make it more efficient, effective and responsible.
•
Second, it builds on the state-led welfare reform successes of the 1990s to strengthen the social safety net.
•
Third, this budget helps to fulfill the mission of health and retirement security for all Americans.
•
Fourth, it will reform the tax code to promote economic growth and job creation.
By removing the anchor of debt that weighs down our economy and advancing pro-growth tax reforms, this budget is a jobs budget. It sends a signal to investors, entrepreneurs and job creators that a brighter future is still possible-that America can still be the growth engine that it ought to be.
An estimate from the Heritage Center for Data Analysis projects The Path to Prosperity to help create nearly 1 million new private-sector jobs next year, bring the unemployment rate down to 4 percent by 2015, and result in 2.5 million additional private-sector jobs in the last year of the decade alone. It spurs economic growth, with $1.5 trillion in additional real GDP over the decade. According to the Heritage analysis, this budget would result in $1.1 trillion in higher wages and an average of $1,000 in additional family income each year. This is a path to prosperity.
It begins by reforming government. The role of the federal government is both vital and limited. When government takes on too many tasks, it usually doesn't do any of them very well.
This budget restores limits to government in order to reduce deficits, save money for taxpayers, and focus federal departments and agencies on critical missions.
The first job of government is to secure the safety and liberty of its citizens. Defense spending should be executed with greater efficiency and accountability, but our men and women in uniform should never be thought of as mere line items on a budget spreadsheet.
This budget follows the lead of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, assuming $178 billion in savings from going after the inefficiencies at the Pentagon, but reinvesting $100 billion of that into key military capabilities, before putting the rest toward deficit reduction.
Other government agencies have important roles to play as well, but the budgets for many of these agencies have grown far beyond what is justified by their properly limited missions. Domestic government agencies enjoyed a 24 percent increase in their base budgets since the President took office-nearly 85 percent when stimulus funds are included.
The massive budget increases of the last few years have served, not to help agencies meet existing missions more effectively, but to create new missions that lie beyond the proper scope of the federal government and serve dubious public policy goals-whether an excessive EPA overreach or the implementation of the disastrous new health care law.
This budget restores spending discipline to a government that badly needs it by returning spending on domestic government agencies to below 2008 levels, and freezing those levels in place for five years.
It does this, not through indiscriminate cuts, but by proposing the elimination of dozens of wasteful and duplicative programs identified by nonpartisan watchdogs and government auditors such as the Government Accountability Office.
And it doesn't just call for government to spend less-it calls for government to refocus on creating the conditions for prosperity, instead of micromanaging the economy.
Washington should not be in the business of picking winners and losers. Jobs are not created when politicians reward their connected cronies with favoritism or fund their ideological adventures. Jobs are created when we choose economic freedom.
So our budget targets corporate welfare programs by proposing to privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which are costing taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.
It gets rid of the permanent Wall Street bailout authority that Congress created last year.
And it rolls back expensive handouts for uncompetitive sources of energy.
Instead, it calls for a free and open marketplace for energy development and innovation. It proposes the removal of moratoriums on safe, responsible energy exploration here in the United States… ends Washington policies that drive up gas prices… and unlocks America's vast energy resources to help lower costs, create jobs, and reduce dependence on foreign oil.
If we want these reforms to last, then it is not enough to change how much government spends-we must also change how government spends.
This budget contains budget-process reforms-including real, enforceable caps on spending-that will reorient government toward spending and taxing only as much as it needs to fulfill its constitutionally prescribed roles.
Welfare reform
The second part of our reform agenda seeks to build on the success of the bipartisan welfare reforms of the late 1990s.
There is a widely shared consensus in this country in support of strong safety net for Americans who, through no fault of their own, have fallen on hard times.
However, the government programs that make up this safety net are coming apart at the seams. It should come as no surprise that a system designed in the 1960s is not equipped to deal with the unique pressures of the 21st century.
Bipartisan efforts in the late 1990s transformed cash welfare by encouraging work, limiting the duration of benefits, and giving states more control over the money being spent.
But cash welfare is only one of 77 means-tested federal government programs. Others, including Medicaid, food stamps, and housing aid, were left un-modernized and unreformed.
This budget completes the work that was left undone with reforms that are centered on individuals and led by the governors at the state level.
Medicaid suffers from the same flawed financing structure that welfare used to suffer from. The federal government provides an open-ended match on what the states spend on Medicaid, which creates perverse incentives and encourages the program's heedless growth.
And states are unable to save money by tailoring the program to meet the unique needs of their own populations. Instead, they must obey one-size-fits-all federal mandates, meaning that the only way they can save any money at all is by cutting reimbursements to doctors and hospitals.
That's why so many doctors refuse to see Medicaid patients-the payment rates in many states are so low that doctors are losing money every time a Medicaid patient walks into their offices.
This budget proposes an end to this one-size-fits-all approach. It converts the federal share of Medicaid spending into a block grant and cuts excessive federal strings, freeing states to design programs that work best for their residents.
Giving states more flexibility will allow them to create a range of options that will give Medicaid patients access to better care.
This budget proposes similar reforms to the food stamp program, ending the same flawed incentive structure that rewards states for signing up ever-higher numbers of recipients, as opposed to rewarding results.
And because the best welfare program is one that ends with a job and a stable, independent life for the individual, this budget aims to streamline and strengthen federal job training programs by consolidating dozens of wasteful and duplicative programs into accountable, targeted career scholarships, aimed at empowering American workers with the resources they need to pursue their dreams.
Entitlement reform
The third part of our reform agenda will put an end to empty promises from a government that is going broke. Instead, it secures health and retirement programs both for current beneficiaries, who will receive the benefits they've organized their retirements around, and for future generations, who will inherit stronger programs they can count on when they retire.
This starts with saving Medicare. The open-ended, blank-check nature of Medicare's subsidy mechanism is threatening the solvency of this critical program and creating inexcusable levels of waste in the system.
Everyone who is on Medicare or knows someone on Medicare has stories about waste in the system-unnecessary tests… redundant treatments… the cost in both time and money of mistaken billings and misplaced records… and just outright fraud. This kind of waste is inevitable in a top-down, government-run system, and it translates into runaway health-care inflation.
This budget repairs Medicare's broken structure and saves the program for current and future beneficiaries.
In observance of the principle that government should reorient its policies without forcing people to reorganize their lives, this budget's reforms will not affect those in or near retirement in any way.
Instead, when people 54 years old and younger become eligible for Medicare, they will be able to choose from a list of Medicare-approved coverage options and pick a plan that best suits their needs.
Medicare would then provide a payment to the plan to subsidize its cost. This plan is identical to the system that members of Congress and other federal employees enjoy. It is similar to how the Medicare prescription drug benefit works today.
This reform plan will preserve Medicare through competition among health plans for the business of millions of seniors, and by trimming billions in waste and fraud.
Under this plan, Medicare will provide wealthy seniors with less assistance, while providing more assistance for lower-income beneficiaries and those with greater health risks. Reform that empowers individuals--with a strengthened safety net for the poor and the sick--will guarantee that Medicare can fulfill the promise of health security for America's seniors.
It will also be necessary to reform Social Security to prevent severe cuts to future benefits. This budget forces policymakers to come to the table and work to enact common-sense reforms.
It does this by requiring the President to submit a plan for restoring balance to the Social Security trust fund, and requiring congressional leaders in the Senate and the House to put forward their best ideas as well. This process is designed to yield a bipartisan solution quickly.
We all know the way forward here. The President's bipartisan Fiscal Commission provided a very good example of what needs to happen to make Social Security solvent.
The Commission proposed a more progressive benefit structure, with benefits for higher-income workers growing more slowly than those of lower-income workers who are more vulnerable to economic shocks in retirement.
The Commission also proposed reforms that account for increases in longevity, to gradually reflect the demographic changes that are straining Social Security's finances.
Although the budget itself does not contain these changes, I support both of these ideas.
The goal of our budget is clear: We must save Social Security for current retirees and strengthen it for future generations.
Tax reform
This budget strives to achieve retirement security, economic security, and fiscal sustainability-but none of this is possible unless we have economic growth. This brings me to tax reform-the fourth part of our agenda. This budget recognizes that the nation's fiscal health requires a vibrant, growing private sector and a tax code that is simple, efficient and fair. Unfortunately, the U.S. tax code fails on all three counts.
This budget attacks complexity, inefficiency and unfairness in the code with a set of fundamental reforms drawn from a broad consensus of economic experts and based on the principle that government should never take a dollar from one of its citizens unless that dollar is needed for an absolutely vital national purpose.
It draws on the commonly held view that the key to pro-growth tax reform is to lower tax rates while broadening the tax base-that is, letting individuals keep more of the money they earn, while getting rid of the distortions and loopholes that divert economic resources from their most efficient uses.
And it starts, not by asking what is the "right mix" of tax increases and spending cuts to balance the budget, but by asking what is the purpose of government, and then raising only as much revenue as the government needs to fund the things it is supposed to be doing.
In 1981, President Ronald Reagan inherited a stagnant economy, with a tax code that featured 16 brackets and a top rate of 70 percent. When he left office in 1989, the tax code had been simplified down to just three brackets, with a top rate of 28 percent.
Over time, additional brackets, credits and carve-outs have grown on the tax code like weeds. As with so many things, such as practicing the politics of optimism, we need to get back to the Reagan model-in this case, by implementing the policies of growth. This budget begins by lowering taxes, with top individual and corporate rates capped at 25 percent. It adopts a revenue neutral approach by clearing out a burdensome tangle of loopholes that distort economic activity.
Finally, this budget fixes a major problem that has distorted economic activity over the last few years: Its reforms are designed to be permanent changes in law, not temporary booster shots or short-term cuts with built-in expiration dates. American families and businesses need-and they deserve-certainty and predictability when it comes to taxes. They need to be able to plan for their economic futures.
Read it & weep hippies!
http://paulryan.house.gov/UploadedFiles/PathToProsperityFY2012.pdf
Our budget is very different. For starters, it cuts $6 trillion in spending from the President's budget over the next ten years, reduces the debt as a percentage of the economy, and puts the nation on a path to actually pay off our national debt. Our proposal brings federal spending back to 20 percent, consistent with the post-war average, and reduces deficits by $4.4 trillion.
Most important, our budget tackles the nation's biggest fiscal challenges head-on. It is a plan for job creation and growth today-a plan that ensures that our children inherit an America stronger, more prosperous, and more free-as past generations have sacrificed to ensure for us.
There are four major aspects of this budget's reform agenda:
•
First, this budget reforms government to make it more efficient, effective and responsible.
•
Second, it builds on the state-led welfare reform successes of the 1990s to strengthen the social safety net.
•
Third, this budget helps to fulfill the mission of health and retirement security for all Americans.
•
Fourth, it will reform the tax code to promote economic growth and job creation.
By removing the anchor of debt that weighs down our economy and advancing pro-growth tax reforms, this budget is a jobs budget. It sends a signal to investors, entrepreneurs and job creators that a brighter future is still possible-that America can still be the growth engine that it ought to be.
An estimate from the Heritage Center for Data Analysis projects The Path to Prosperity to help create nearly 1 million new private-sector jobs next year, bring the unemployment rate down to 4 percent by 2015, and result in 2.5 million additional private-sector jobs in the last year of the decade alone. It spurs economic growth, with $1.5 trillion in additional real GDP over the decade. According to the Heritage analysis, this budget would result in $1.1 trillion in higher wages and an average of $1,000 in additional family income each year. This is a path to prosperity.
It begins by reforming government. The role of the federal government is both vital and limited. When government takes on too many tasks, it usually doesn't do any of them very well.
This budget restores limits to government in order to reduce deficits, save money for taxpayers, and focus federal departments and agencies on critical missions.
The first job of government is to secure the safety and liberty of its citizens. Defense spending should be executed with greater efficiency and accountability, but our men and women in uniform should never be thought of as mere line items on a budget spreadsheet.
This budget follows the lead of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, assuming $178 billion in savings from going after the inefficiencies at the Pentagon, but reinvesting $100 billion of that into key military capabilities, before putting the rest toward deficit reduction.
Other government agencies have important roles to play as well, but the budgets for many of these agencies have grown far beyond what is justified by their properly limited missions. Domestic government agencies enjoyed a 24 percent increase in their base budgets since the President took office-nearly 85 percent when stimulus funds are included.
The massive budget increases of the last few years have served, not to help agencies meet existing missions more effectively, but to create new missions that lie beyond the proper scope of the federal government and serve dubious public policy goals-whether an excessive EPA overreach or the implementation of the disastrous new health care law.
This budget restores spending discipline to a government that badly needs it by returning spending on domestic government agencies to below 2008 levels, and freezing those levels in place for five years.
It does this, not through indiscriminate cuts, but by proposing the elimination of dozens of wasteful and duplicative programs identified by nonpartisan watchdogs and government auditors such as the Government Accountability Office.
And it doesn't just call for government to spend less-it calls for government to refocus on creating the conditions for prosperity, instead of micromanaging the economy.
Washington should not be in the business of picking winners and losers. Jobs are not created when politicians reward their connected cronies with favoritism or fund their ideological adventures. Jobs are created when we choose economic freedom.
So our budget targets corporate welfare programs by proposing to privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which are costing taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.
It gets rid of the permanent Wall Street bailout authority that Congress created last year.
And it rolls back expensive handouts for uncompetitive sources of energy.
Instead, it calls for a free and open marketplace for energy development and innovation. It proposes the removal of moratoriums on safe, responsible energy exploration here in the United States… ends Washington policies that drive up gas prices… and unlocks America's vast energy resources to help lower costs, create jobs, and reduce dependence on foreign oil.
If we want these reforms to last, then it is not enough to change how much government spends-we must also change how government spends.
This budget contains budget-process reforms-including real, enforceable caps on spending-that will reorient government toward spending and taxing only as much as it needs to fulfill its constitutionally prescribed roles.
Welfare reform
The second part of our reform agenda seeks to build on the success of the bipartisan welfare reforms of the late 1990s.
There is a widely shared consensus in this country in support of strong safety net for Americans who, through no fault of their own, have fallen on hard times.
However, the government programs that make up this safety net are coming apart at the seams. It should come as no surprise that a system designed in the 1960s is not equipped to deal with the unique pressures of the 21st century.
Bipartisan efforts in the late 1990s transformed cash welfare by encouraging work, limiting the duration of benefits, and giving states more control over the money being spent.
But cash welfare is only one of 77 means-tested federal government programs. Others, including Medicaid, food stamps, and housing aid, were left un-modernized and unreformed.
This budget completes the work that was left undone with reforms that are centered on individuals and led by the governors at the state level.
Medicaid suffers from the same flawed financing structure that welfare used to suffer from. The federal government provides an open-ended match on what the states spend on Medicaid, which creates perverse incentives and encourages the program's heedless growth.
And states are unable to save money by tailoring the program to meet the unique needs of their own populations. Instead, they must obey one-size-fits-all federal mandates, meaning that the only way they can save any money at all is by cutting reimbursements to doctors and hospitals.
That's why so many doctors refuse to see Medicaid patients-the payment rates in many states are so low that doctors are losing money every time a Medicaid patient walks into their offices.
This budget proposes an end to this one-size-fits-all approach. It converts the federal share of Medicaid spending into a block grant and cuts excessive federal strings, freeing states to design programs that work best for their residents.
Giving states more flexibility will allow them to create a range of options that will give Medicaid patients access to better care.
This budget proposes similar reforms to the food stamp program, ending the same flawed incentive structure that rewards states for signing up ever-higher numbers of recipients, as opposed to rewarding results.
And because the best welfare program is one that ends with a job and a stable, independent life for the individual, this budget aims to streamline and strengthen federal job training programs by consolidating dozens of wasteful and duplicative programs into accountable, targeted career scholarships, aimed at empowering American workers with the resources they need to pursue their dreams.
Entitlement reform
The third part of our reform agenda will put an end to empty promises from a government that is going broke. Instead, it secures health and retirement programs both for current beneficiaries, who will receive the benefits they've organized their retirements around, and for future generations, who will inherit stronger programs they can count on when they retire.
This starts with saving Medicare. The open-ended, blank-check nature of Medicare's subsidy mechanism is threatening the solvency of this critical program and creating inexcusable levels of waste in the system.
Everyone who is on Medicare or knows someone on Medicare has stories about waste in the system-unnecessary tests… redundant treatments… the cost in both time and money of mistaken billings and misplaced records… and just outright fraud. This kind of waste is inevitable in a top-down, government-run system, and it translates into runaway health-care inflation.
This budget repairs Medicare's broken structure and saves the program for current and future beneficiaries.
In observance of the principle that government should reorient its policies without forcing people to reorganize their lives, this budget's reforms will not affect those in or near retirement in any way.
Instead, when people 54 years old and younger become eligible for Medicare, they will be able to choose from a list of Medicare-approved coverage options and pick a plan that best suits their needs.
Medicare would then provide a payment to the plan to subsidize its cost. This plan is identical to the system that members of Congress and other federal employees enjoy. It is similar to how the Medicare prescription drug benefit works today.
This reform plan will preserve Medicare through competition among health plans for the business of millions of seniors, and by trimming billions in waste and fraud.
Under this plan, Medicare will provide wealthy seniors with less assistance, while providing more assistance for lower-income beneficiaries and those with greater health risks. Reform that empowers individuals--with a strengthened safety net for the poor and the sick--will guarantee that Medicare can fulfill the promise of health security for America's seniors.
It will also be necessary to reform Social Security to prevent severe cuts to future benefits. This budget forces policymakers to come to the table and work to enact common-sense reforms.
It does this by requiring the President to submit a plan for restoring balance to the Social Security trust fund, and requiring congressional leaders in the Senate and the House to put forward their best ideas as well. This process is designed to yield a bipartisan solution quickly.
We all know the way forward here. The President's bipartisan Fiscal Commission provided a very good example of what needs to happen to make Social Security solvent.
The Commission proposed a more progressive benefit structure, with benefits for higher-income workers growing more slowly than those of lower-income workers who are more vulnerable to economic shocks in retirement.
The Commission also proposed reforms that account for increases in longevity, to gradually reflect the demographic changes that are straining Social Security's finances.
Although the budget itself does not contain these changes, I support both of these ideas.
The goal of our budget is clear: We must save Social Security for current retirees and strengthen it for future generations.
Tax reform
This budget strives to achieve retirement security, economic security, and fiscal sustainability-but none of this is possible unless we have economic growth. This brings me to tax reform-the fourth part of our agenda. This budget recognizes that the nation's fiscal health requires a vibrant, growing private sector and a tax code that is simple, efficient and fair. Unfortunately, the U.S. tax code fails on all three counts.
This budget attacks complexity, inefficiency and unfairness in the code with a set of fundamental reforms drawn from a broad consensus of economic experts and based on the principle that government should never take a dollar from one of its citizens unless that dollar is needed for an absolutely vital national purpose.
It draws on the commonly held view that the key to pro-growth tax reform is to lower tax rates while broadening the tax base-that is, letting individuals keep more of the money they earn, while getting rid of the distortions and loopholes that divert economic resources from their most efficient uses.
And it starts, not by asking what is the "right mix" of tax increases and spending cuts to balance the budget, but by asking what is the purpose of government, and then raising only as much revenue as the government needs to fund the things it is supposed to be doing.
In 1981, President Ronald Reagan inherited a stagnant economy, with a tax code that featured 16 brackets and a top rate of 70 percent. When he left office in 1989, the tax code had been simplified down to just three brackets, with a top rate of 28 percent.
Over time, additional brackets, credits and carve-outs have grown on the tax code like weeds. As with so many things, such as practicing the politics of optimism, we need to get back to the Reagan model-in this case, by implementing the policies of growth. This budget begins by lowering taxes, with top individual and corporate rates capped at 25 percent. It adopts a revenue neutral approach by clearing out a burdensome tangle of loopholes that distort economic activity.
Finally, this budget fixes a major problem that has distorted economic activity over the last few years: Its reforms are designed to be permanent changes in law, not temporary booster shots or short-term cuts with built-in expiration dates. American families and businesses need-and they deserve-certainty and predictability when it comes to taxes. They need to be able to plan for their economic futures.