This chart was put together by the Republican staff of the House Budget Committee, to help promote Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-Wis.) piece on the GOP's alternative budget. You'll notice, of course, that it shows those wacky Democrats with spending projections that fly right off the map several decades from now -- before some of the lawmakers of 2050 are even born -- while those nice, responsible Republicans take a more modest approach.Actually, most children seem to have a better grasp on reality, so if I had a choice between Ms. Smith's first-grade class and the Cons as our budget gurus, I'd pick the first-graders without an instant's hesitation.Conor Clarke calls this "crazy," and "pretty stupid," before explaining, "As near as I can tell, Paul Ryan and his staff just took the CBO projections that ended in 2019 and drew a random line, extending upward at about a 45 degree angle, until 2080. There's no real attempt to make it look scientific."
And if it were just one silly chart, it would be easier to ignore. But the problem with today's budget blueprint from the House Republican caucus is that it takes a similarly ridiculous approach to just about everything. It's one thing to offer bad ideas. It's another to offer bad ideas without doing your homework. But House GOP lawmakers are offering proposals that are just insane. Reading through the party's new report, one notices that we'd get just as serious a proposal from a group of children with crayons.
Dday continues the spanking for Steve Benen, whose Smack-o-Matic arm was getting tired:
I'm beginning to think the Republican Party is a giant episode of "Punk'd."
What amounts to the alternative budget, seen here and described by Paul Ryan in the Wall Street Journal, consists mainly of those innovative and fresh ideas like cutting taxes on corporations and the wealthy, freezing spending in the middle of a recession, and drilling for oil.These fuckwits aren't fit to govern. They aren't even mature enough to use the pointy scissors. If these dumbshits end up inexplicably becoming the elected majority again, I'm moving to New Zealand with PZ.
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They also helpfully scored the competing budgets over a 70-year time-frame, and while I think they're off a bit in 2072, you can plainly see that government under Robot Obama, who will be governing until he is 117, will explode in size.
I hadn't even noticed the time scale of that graph before. It's a rare projection that's right more than a year or so, let alone seventy.
ReplyDeleteThe part I just adored was Ryan's reference to the "third and final wave" of progressive legislation, as if we had a plan with waves in it.