The Ryan budget proposal

Ezra Klein offers some points of clarification:

Perhaps the simplest way to understand what’s going on in Paul Ryan’s budget, and whether it’s plausible, is to look at page 13 of the Congressional Budget Office’s summary of the Ryan plan (pdf). That’s where the CBO lists Ryan’s assumptions about how future budgets would differ under his proposal and under an alternative, high-deficit scenario. That lets us see where, exactly, Ryan’s presumed savings are. And they’re not, for the most part, in Medicare.

In 2030, spending on Medicare is .75 percent of GDP lower than in the alternative fiscal scenario. In fact, Ryan and the Obama administration have proposed the same rate of growth for Medicare: GDP + 0.5 percent.

It’s Medicaid and other health spending, which includes the Affordable Care Act, where Ryan really brings down the hammer: That category falls by 1.25 percent of GDP. So Ryan’s cuts to health care for the poor are almost twice the size of his cuts to health care for the old.

And then there’s the “everything else” category, which includes defense spending, infrastructure, education and training, farm subsidies, income supports, veteran’s benefits, retraining, basic research, the federal workforce and much, much more. And this category of spending falls by 2.5 percent of GDP.

Putting normative issues aside, I am predicting that something like this is what will happen, and it won’t require major Republican victories.  In short, those are the most vulnerable interest groups.