Representative Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, has pulled off a Bullwinkle the Moose in trying to pull his rabbit out of a hat. As Bullwinkle, he pulls off the feat in amazing obviousness, but misses the point of misdirection and thereby actually has no rabbit to pull out of the hat.
In fact, he doesn't even have a lucky rabbit's foot to pull out of the hat. Instead, he constantly pulls out things that are dangerous to himself and the American people just as Bullwinkle did. One has to assume that Bullwinkle was relatively young because he never realizes that his efforts to produce a rabbit constantly produce things other than a rabbit. The good thing is that Bullwinkle can put them back into the hat.
Paul Ryan cannot put this back into the hat. And what he is proposing is a beast of consumption that will ultimately continue the insurance companies' hold on the American people and yet will not produce a condition whereby our debt will decrease without laying the costs upon the people least able to afford the costs.
Ostensibly, Paul Ryan is suggesting that he has pulled a rabbit out of the hat even if he removes the python that has eaten the rabbit. I guess that might be a certain level of truth, but not unless you can dissect the python, thereby killing it in search of the rabbit in the digestive system.
He has to admit that he cannot pull a rabbit out of his hat, or admit that in order to show the rabbit, he will have to kill the programs he has decided to promote as the rabbit in order to actually show the audience the rabbit.
Show me the money.
I can come up with lots of ways for fixing the deficit and start to eat down the debt, but not without actually having the rabbit food to keep the rabbit alive, and the means of keeping the python out of the hat to eat my well maintained rabbit. And both of these requirements cost money to accomplish.
So I assume that Paul Ryan is willing to feed his invading python the poor to eat in order to keep his cost increasing rabbit alive.
All of the allegory aside, I assume that Paul Ryan is willing to kill Medicare/Medicaid at the cost of the people least able to support the extra burden. He does so by deciding that the elderly, who happen to be the biggest voting block and those most likely to turn up at the polls, away from any controversial decisions, thus guaranteeing that they become a part of his constituency simply due to the fact that they are not the ones bearing the burden of his proposals.
So instead of actually sharing the burden across a broad spectrum of Americans today, he gives a pass to the elderly and places that burden on the people at the bottom of the totem pole. After all, they are already there and not likely to become part of the country's elite, so who cares about them.
He fails to recognize that vast numbers of people are moving from the middle wage earners to the unemployed, houseless poor who's only ability is to vote.
If we can take history as any indicator, and I believe we can, than the people he is going to be placing into the position to increase costs upon are those least likely to be able to pay those costs. This is what I've written about before, which is diminishing returns.
By suggesting that these burdens can be placed upon the millions of people who are losing their own ability to earn a living, he has built a house of cards in a windstorm. He has decided that there are enough people to bear the burden without understanding the underlying reason there are now 46 million people below the poverty level. Yet he relies upon this group of people to continue to support corporations and rich people with yet Trillions more dollars of tax breaks and this is supposed to increase our tax revenues.
Let's face it. Only the poor and middle wage earners are being assaulted by this budget proposal, and none of the figures Paul Ryan has presented represents any of the facts.
By dividing off the younger from the older, he has shifted the costs of Medicare to the younger when the older vote in every election, will be maintained. Not a bad political move, but it is unsustainable, just like taxing cigarettes when you expect people to stop spending money on them because of the higher costs.
Now admittedly I like the idea of bringing down the tax rate across the board, but only by making it apply to all people at the same time. When you knock everyone down to 25% taxes across the board, the greatest amount of people paying that 25% are those who make less, but the percentage is a greater share of their income. One only has to do the math.
If a family of four makes $50,000 per year then their tax is $12,500. Thus they are pulling down $37,500. Barely subsistence once you factor in $4.00 per gallon of gas, higher insurance costs, milk at about the same as gas, and hamburger at the same. Sometimes it seems that every product ends up becoming the same price so you don't notice. We have this situation right now. $3.79 for milk, hamburger at $3.99, gas at $3.49 or more, it all adds up. My tax person told me a flat tax would cost me about $9k more, almost without regard for what the tax rate was.
Now take a look at a millionaire. We'll only multiply it by 20 to keep it simple. That means taxes on a millionaire are $250,000, which one might assume is acceptable. But whilst the lower wage earner only has $37.5k to work with for health care, car insurance, household payments, etc., the millionaire still has $750,000 to live on.
The millionaire is capable of spending more money on health care, requires less money to buy hamburger or milk, and even if he pays for a $40k per year college education for his offspring, still has money left over.
How is this equitable?
Then we have to come up with a definition of what is equitable. And one has to assume that the millionaire actually has the right to buy whatever house they can either qualify for, assuming that rich people love to put other people's money to work for them. I don't begrudge a person making a million dollars a year or more. I just begrudge them the apparent right to keep more of their money than I can keep of mine.
Of course, Paul Ryan doesn't give us any idea of just what tax breaks he's willing to give to the rich because he hasn't taken that up in his budget proposal. He simply says 25% across the board.
The concept of a flat tax is a fallacy because taxes, whilst perhaps the same percentage, are specifically aimed at those who make the least amount of money.
We need to talk about equitable taxes, and that still means a progressive tax, which means that those earning the most money pay according to their ability to pay.
A family of four, in today's environment of greater costs to keep their heads above water, would pay less dollars than the 25% charged to the rich, whilst the richest who could simply adjust how much money they have to invest, pay the greatest amount of tax, and have on hand whatever that may end up being, but it is far greater than those who had $12,500 taken out of their pay.
Right now the rich pay 17% or less, depending upon how their compensation is designed. The middle wage earner doesn't get a designed compensation, so they pay significantly more per their income. And because there are far more middle wage earners than rich people, the burden falls to the middle wage earner.
Paul Ryan's budget proposal not only places a greater burden on the middle wage earner to pay the price of health care for the poor, but it also suggests that the middle wage earner should be subsidizing the rich by another Trillion dollars over the next ten years.
Look, you can go back and research the situation, but there never was a ratified 16th Amendment authorizing personal income tax. I'm not one of the Grover Norquist guys, but facts are facts.
The problem with it is that any tax system which isn't extremely progressive when you start getting up into the rich and super-rich brackets simply is transferring money from the poor to the rich.
Paul Ryan wants to continue playing with the rich and his budget proposal does just that.
Don't blame him. He still thinks he's actually pulling a rabbit out of a hat.
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