Image via WikipediaRound Two-Showdown over funding the government through the end of this fiscal year.
Round Three-The debt ceiling fight now in progress-two opposing sets of values.
Paul Ryan has been hailed for his "vision" evidenced in his budget proposal.
By proposing to dismantle Medicare for people retiring in 2021 and afterwards, he's laid out a radical alternative to today's policies. By slashing taxes for the wealthy and proposing deregulation for all industries, the Ryan plan envisions a future America: one where the environment is despoiled, the poor go unfed, and the middle class faces a lifetime of financial insecurity following by an old age of sickness and penury.When President Obama offered his budget proposal, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security remain in tact. He supported his healthcare plan to address Medicare and Medicaid issues. He proposed a return to the Bush-Clinton policies that put us on the path to budget surpluses in the 1990s — and he will be able to restore the Clinton tax rates simply, with his veto pen, if necessary, in 2013. He proposed a tax-reform process that will eliminate loopholes. All in all, his plan is reasonable and far less distasteful than that of the Republicans.
Joe Klein, Time Magazine, offers a summary of the President's history lesson:
Republicans, colleagues of Paul Ryan's, voted for the Bush tax cuts — which, as Obama noted, added $500 billion per year to the deficit — and they also voted for the (unpaid for) wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a massive (unpaid for) Medicare prescription-drug benefit. On top of these obligations, we suffered a severe recession starting in 2008, which reduced tax revenue by an estimated $500 billion per year — and which required nearly a trillion dollars in government spending to avert a total economic collapse. And voilá, this year's $1.6 trillion budget deficit.As the round three battle begins, I hear Rodney King in the background..."Can't we all just get along?".
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