On the TPM blog, Brian Beutler on May 16, 2012 writes:
“Nearly all Senate Republicans joined their House colleagues in risky territory Wednesday by voting in support of the controversial GOP budget, authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) — a blueprint for the country’s future that has become a political lightning rod and a defining document for the 2012 elections.
“Among its most contentious features, the plan would phase out the existing Medicare program and replace it with a subsidized private insurance system for seniors; dramatically slash Medicaid spending and hand the program over to the states; cut food and nutrition programs for poor people; and allow interest rates on student loans to double; all while dramatically reducing taxes, particularly on wealthy Americans.
“It’s a governing agenda many Republicans would like to wash down the memory hole. But over the past year it’s become a Kryptonite touchstone for conservative purity — a plan most Republicans feel compelled to support, but which they understand to be politically deadly.
“The final vote was 41-58, shy of the 51 required for passage. The Senate GOP boxed themselves in to support of the framework by overwhelmingly voting for a similar plan last year.”
The Republican budget basically seeks to shift a share of government costs onto the citizens of the country with seniors particularly affected with the proposed phase out the existing Medicare program, replaced with a subsidized private insurance system. The result would be to dramatically slash Medicaid spending. Other budget provisions would cut food and nutrition programs for poor people and allow interest rates on student loans to double. These cuts would seriously impact the old, young and poor, who are less able to fully support themselves.
Seniors are at a stage of their life where the vast majority depend on Social Security and Medicare to survive. The young are at a stage whereby to seek higher education requires substantial sums of money that they simply cannot not muster on their own. The poor are stuck in a continual situation where job opportunities do not exist or, when they do, pay poverty wages.
Our government needs to honor its commitments to the old and not force them into a private insurance system, even if partially subsidized. Young people need to have access to extremely low cost loans to support their higher education ambitions. The poor need support beyond greater job opportunities.
Our leaders need to embark on a path of prosperity, opportunity, and economic justice through empowering ALL Americans to acquire long term viable productive capital ownership portfolios that would produce income to not only pay off the initial insured capital loans used to acquire the newly issued full-dividend-entitled corporate stock, but once paid, provide a stream of continual income. For most people, this process would begin at the time one enters the economic world as a labor worker, increasingly progressing though life as a capital worker (owner), and at some point retiring as a labor worker but continuing to participate in production and to earn income as a capital worker to the end of one’s life. Not only would this approach stimulate the economy’s growth but, as a result, “real” job opportunities would be greatly expanded and over time every single American would be strengthened economically and be less needful of government welfare, open or concealed. This would enable those dependent on their labor to produce income and the poor (all people without a viable capital estate) to steadily advance economically. For this to work, our restrictive financial system, which perpetuates concentrated capital ownership and clinically denies ownership to those who need it, must be reformed.
Without this necessary balance hopeless poverty, social alienation, and economic breakdown will persist, even though the American economy is ripe with the physical, technical, managerial, and engineering prerequisites for improving the lives of the 99 percent majority. Why? Because there is a crippling organizational malfunction that prevents making full use of the technological prowess that we have developed. The system does not fully facilitate connecting the majority of citizens, who have unsatisfied needs and wants, to the productive capital assets enabling productive efficiency and economic growth.
The Republican budget is founded on “self-responsibility” and laissez-faire ideology. Some conservative thinkers have acknowledged the damaging results of a laissez-faire ideology, which furthers the concentration of productive capital ownership. They are floundering in search of alternative thinking as they acknowledge the negative economic and social realities resulting from greed capitalism. This acknowledgment encompasses the realization that the troubling economic and social trends (global capitalism, free-trade doctrine, tectonic shifts in the technologies of production and the steady off-loading of American manufacturing and jobs) caused by continued concentrated ownership of productive capital will threaten the stability of contemporary liberal democracies and dethrone democratic ideology as it is now understood.
Without a policy shift to broaden productive capital ownership simultaneously with economic growth, further development of technology and globalization will undermine the American working class and poor and make it impossible for more than a minority of citizens to achieve middle-class status.
President Obama stated: “What’s at stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure their retirement.” As long as working people are limited by earning income solely through their labor worker wages, they will be left behind by the continued gravitation of economic bounty toward the top 1 percent of the people that the system is rigged to benefit. Working people and the middle class will continue to stagnate, resulting in a stagnated consumer economy with ever increasing fellow American destined to a poverty existence. More troubling is that this continued stagnation will further dim the economic hopes of America’s youth, no matter what their education level. The result will have profound long-term consequences for the nation’s economic health and further limit equal earning opportunity and spread income inequality. As the need for labor decreases and the power and leverage of productive capital increases, the gap between labor workers and capital owners will increase, and more people will become dependent on some form of welfare.
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/05/senate-republicans-paul-ryan-medicare.php
