Joe Conason: Paul Ryan's populism: Raising taxes on the middle class

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Paul Ryan's populism: Raising taxes on the middle class
Joe Conason
Rep. Paul Ryan's "tough" budget would raise middle-class taxes, favor the wealthy -- and fail to balance the budget


From the editorial pages of major newspapers to "Hardball's" Chris Matthews to President Obama himself, nearly everyone in public life seems to feel obliged to praise Rep. Paul Ryan for his tough-minded, cost-slashing budget "road map" that even his own party isn't quite bold enough to fully adopt. In the mainstream media, the Wisconsin Republican is often presented as a straight-shooting prophet whose prescriptions for privatizing Social Security and eviscerating Medicare can only be ignored if we want to jeopardize America's future, and so on.

Fortunately, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has studied Ryan's proposals with its usual perspicacity and issued a clear warning that his road map would only lead us -- after a series of hard-right turns -- to the same old plutocratic dead end. Like so many Republican speeches about fiscal responsibility, the Ryan promise to balance the budget is a scam whose real purpose has more to do with redistributing taxes downward and wealth upward -- that is, more of the same.

The CBPP report is bracing in its candor about what we might actually expect from enacting Ryan's plan -- as opposed to its advertised effects. The middle-class tea party types who believe the Republicans will save them from high taxes and big deficits should know that Ryan's plan will not lead to fiscal balance someday, but in fact is more likely to balloon both deficits and debt until well after 2070.

What should be even more disturbing, from the tea party perspective, is that the Ryan plan sharply raises federal taxes on the middle class by imposing a value-added or sales tax. It raises taxes on the consumption of items like tea, quite literally. By definition such taxes are regressive, falling much more heavily on working- and middle-income families than on the rich, unless they include specific features to make them more equitable (which the Ryan version does not).

The fiscal analysis used by the CBPP found that three out of four Americans, with incomes between $20,000 and $200,000, would see their taxes go up, not down, if Ryan's plan replaced current law.

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http://www.salon.com/news/taxes/index.html?story=/opinion/conason/2010/03/15/ryantea

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