Conservative Trashes Middle-Class and Blue Collar Workers - Paul Ryan (R-WI) Dreams of Making America Into 17th Century France

Conservative Trashes Middle-Class and Blue Collar Workers - Paul Ryan (R-WI) Dreams of Making America Into 17th Century France

Even as House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget would impose trillions of dollars in spending cuts, 62 percent of which would come from low-income programs,[1] it would enact new tax cuts that would provide huge windfalls to households at the top of the income scale.  New analysis by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center (TPC) finds that people earning more than $1 million a year would receive $265,000 apiece in new tax cuts, on average, on top of the $129,000 they would receive from the Ryan budget’s extension of President Bush’s tax cuts.[2] 

The new tax cuts at the top would dwarf those for middle-and lower-income families.  After-tax incomes would rise by 12.5 percent among millionaires, but just 1.9 percent for middle-income households (see Figure 1 and footnote 6).

Chairman Ryan claims that his budget would fully offset the cost of his proposed tax cuts by closing tax expenditures (tax credits, deductions, and other preferences) for high-income households.  But his budget contains no specific proposals to do so, and meeting this goal would be all but impossible, given that the Ryan budget rules out reducing the tax expenditure most heavily tilted to high-income households:  the preferential rates for capital gains and dividends.[3]

By combining large budget cuts that disproportionately harm lower-income Americans with large tax cuts that disproportionately help those at the top of the income scale, the Ryan budget would significantly worsen inequality and increase poverty and hardship (and reduce opportunity as well, through deep cuts in programs such as Pell Grants to help low-income students afford college).
Plan Would Cut Top Rate to Lowest Level Since Hoover Administration

The Ryan budget includes a number of specific tax cuts, on top of making the Bush tax cuts permanent.  All of its new tax cuts are both expensive and tilted toward high-income households.  It would cut the top individual tax rate to 25 percent, the lowest level since the Hoover Administration more than 80 years ago.  It would cut the corporate rate to 25 percent and eliminate both the Alternative Minimum Tax and the Affordable Care Act’s increase in the Medicare tax for high-income people.

A new TPC analysis finds that people with incomes above $1 million would receive a $265,000 average annual tax cut just from the new Ryan proposals (i.e., not counting what they would also receive from extension of the Bush tax cuts).  Middle-income taxpayers — those with incomes between $50,000 and $75,000 — would receive $1,045, on average.[4]

How did Paul Ryan get elected to Congress? How did someone who hates Americans that work for a living - teachers, carpenters, nurses, store clerks, waitresses, tire changers, taxi drivers, road maintenance crews etc. - get so much power and influence over the lives of people who do actual work. Unlike Ryan's millionaire friends whose wealth comes from the work of others. Ryan, like the rest of the conservative movement is out to protect the unearned wealth of society's leeches at the expense of working Americans.