Congress, Politics

Rep. Paul Ryan Wants to Address the Drivers of Our Debt

-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger

Republicans have decided that their talking points should be about the national debt instead of, say, job creation. To that end, Rep. Paul Ryan, on one of those Sunday morning talk shows, said “We need to address the drivers of our debt.”

That’s a great idea.

Maybe Ryan expected that no one would take him up on that offer, but it’s too late. Chad Stone, chief economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has done what Ryan wanted. The result might not be what the Republican’s chief budget specialist had imagined.

The chart below shows the Bush/Obama tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan account for almost half of the projected debt by 2019.

H/T: Steve Benen.

29 thoughts on “Rep. Paul Ryan Wants to Address the Drivers of Our Debt”

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  3. Otteray Scribe,

    That’s funny!

    And the media initially praised his plan … there are some seriously stupid people in this country and many of them carry microphones.

  4. I read a comment somewhere today that said Paul Ryan’s budget plan was actually a GOP suicide note.

  5. Apparently WordPress believes that an 8 with a right parenthesis is better depicted as an emoticon.

  6. ekeyra – in order to meet the $65 trillion in commitments you show, I predict the US government will do a combination of the following:

    1) raise income taxes until marginal increases no longer result in revenue increases

    2) means-test entitlements

    3) introduce a Value Added Tax scheme

    4) use outright wealth seizures (wealth taxes, nationalization of industries), starting with unfavored sectors including energy

    5) mandate private retirement accounts, and force large purchases of US Treasuries in those accounts

    6) issue tens of trillions in new debt, defaulting on the real value of the obligations and creating widespread, steep inflation or even hyperinflation

    7) use the threat of military force to coerce debt forgiveness by foreign entities, particularly in Asia

    8) continue to build a US empire and war policy designed to plunder foreign resources rather than trading for those resources

    Ever-expanding government and the use of popular entitlement promises and corporatism to win elections is resulting in a viscous use of government power to steal from citizens and nations across the globe, to murder for empire, and to create a police state to silence dissent. It must be fought on all fronts.

  7. Except that can it be called the ‘Bush tax cuts’ if President Obama continued to approve/extend them? At some point, don’t Bush’s tax cuts and Bush’s wars become President Obama’s tax cuts and wars (judge the man by his actions, not his words).

  9. This is an important point in understanding the debt, but look at the left scale on that graph – it’s “percentage”. In this context, what the hell does that mean?

    Yes, poorly distributed tax cuts is a huge part of the problem, but I don’t think that I can quite tell what’s going on from that graph with it’s weird “percentage” scale. (and the fact that nothing on it totals to 100%).

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