Let them eat vouchers.

[TheBigotBasher]

Today the Political Wing of the Tea Party revealed their budget proposals and not one reporter called them on it. A giant money grab that will do nothing to reduce the National Debt or the deficit (despite huge cuts to medicaid, social security and programmes for the poor the deficit will grow to 75% under their plan).

No-one called them on their big plan to cut the deficit. Kill Granny. For all the tak of death panels the political wing of the Tea Party are now proposing a voucher system to cover an insurance market that before medicare simply did not exist. A voucher will not cure a tumor but it may be used as a replacement band-aid because that will be its real value in a non existant market.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget showed great love for the Ryan plan. A plan so full of holes the Swiss need to worry about their cheese.

Their highly favourable review glosses over a voucher system to replace medicare as brave, it glosses over the giant wealth transfer from the poor to the rich of an introduction of a Federal VAT to in part offset tax cuts for the top 1% and it glosses over all of the pain of the cuts to welfare and social security programmes.

So what will the effect of all of this pain be?

No reduction in the National Debt at all, deficits for decades to come and rising debt. Of course as it is a Republican plan, those deficits do not count. The debt will carry on increasing at a rapid rate until 2013 and there is a vague hope that the debt will reduce after that as a result of growth - sometime between 2050 and never. As predicted by the people who said the Bush tax cuts would generate a boom - the Heritage Foundation. This plan commits the Tea Party to carry on voting for increases in the debt limit until well after 2050. Or in the glossy language used by the CRFB to disguise that very point:

Under Ryan's plan, debt would rise slightly from about 69 percent of GDP this year to 75 percent in 2013 before falling to 68 percent in 2021. After 2021, debt would continue on a downward trajectory, falling to 64 percent by 2030, 48 percent in 2040, and 10 percent by 2050.

This really is not a serious plan at all, it is a money grab.

You pay, granny dies. The billionaires get all the pies. A very "brave" plan indeed.