When the Ryan plan robs from the poor to give to the rich — without concealment and without apology — and when poor, working, and middle class conservatives support it anyway, what can you call it but chronic Obama Derangement Syndrome? Stockholm Syndrome? Unforgivably stupid?

Ryan’s Budget: tax cuts for the wealthy, austerity for the rest of us

Chairman Ryan’s budget proposes $5.3 trillion in nondefense budget cuts (and about $200 billion in defense increases).  The $5.3 trillion in cuts includes $1.2 trillion in cuts to nondefense discretionary programs; this $1.2 trillion in cuts is beyond the cuts needed to comply with the strict funding caps that the Budget Control Act established.  Several hundred billion dollars of these additional cuts would very likely come from low-income programs.

Paul Krugman calls it fraudulent.

Pink Slime Economics and the Most Fraudulent Budget in US History

[...] And when I say fraudulent, I mean just that. The trouble with the budget devised by Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, isn’t just its almost inconceivably cruel priorities, the way it slashes taxes for corporations and the rich while drastically cutting food and medical aid to the needy. Even aside from all that, the Ryan budget purports to reduce the deficit — but the alleged deficit reduction depends on the completely unsupported assertion that trillions of dollars in revenue can be found by closing tax loopholes.

And we’re talking about a lot of loophole-closing. As Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center points out, to make his numbers work Mr. Ryan would, by 2022, have to close enough loopholes to yield an extra $700 billion in revenue every year. That’s a lot of money, even in an economy as big as ours. So which specific loopholes has Mr. Ryan, who issued a 98-page manifesto on behalf of his budget, said he would close?

None. Not one. He has, however, categorically ruled out any move to close the major loophole that benefits the rich, namely the ultra-low tax rates on income from capital. (That’s the loophole that lets Mitt Romney pay only 14 percent of his income in taxes, a lower tax rate than that faced by many middle-class families.)

Read it all…

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities spells out what Priority #1 is for Paul Ryan and the Republicans in the House who passed his budget last Thursday: making the rich richer.

Tax cuts for the rich, forever and ever, Amen.

As noted, these regressive new tax cuts would come on top of the Bush tax cuts, which also were costly and provided disproportionate gains to the highest-income households.  Combined, the Bush and Ryan tax cuts would provide an annual windfall of nearly $400,000 apiece, on average, to people with incomes over $1 million (see Figure 3).  For these people, their tax cuts would be eight times the average total after-taxincomes of people in the middle 20 percent of the income scale.

The Bush tax cuts contributed significantly to the emergence of large deficits over the past decade and would prove even more unaffordable in coming decades if policymakers extended them.  Yet, instead of letting them expire as the economy recovers, the Ryan budget would “double down” by extending them and adding another round of costly, regressive tax cuts on top.

Here’s an important reminder to all the people who support the Republican Party’s outrageous and disgusting income redistribution scheme out of some weird desire to control other people’s lives: