So, you're saying that Paul Krugman's graph, showing that Ryan's tax plan would be a massive re-distribution from the middle class to the top 10% is completely false?

Please, please have a face off online < g >

Describing payroll taxes as regressive or progressive is complex. For example, if all people pay the government $1,000 and receive $1,000 in benefits is this regressive? Would eliminating the program make the government more progressive?

What needs to be measured is the wealth transfers involved in taxing and providing benefits.

You are discussing vouchers again and I'm glad Ryan is still on this thread. I want to discuss two vouchers: Ryan's medicare voucher and the non-existent housing voucher.

After reading a recent Krugman column promoting medicare-for-all, I realize I wish to distance myself as far as possible from the medicare-for-all and medicare-for-more-of-us crowds. If Krugman is a Democrat, then it is quite possible that I really am a Republican.

It is difficult for me to see how subsidizing a basic original medicare premium (part B) would be a desirable thing, since I would use the health subsidy in the legislation to buy private insurance. I am not as adaptable to "welfare class" standards as everybody else. The bare bones are too bare for me, having enjoyed company group insurance during my career as a captive and a robust reasonably priced Blue Shield policy during my years of self-employment. I would miss the seamless qualities that allowed me to use any hospital and any doctor anywhere. I would miss the benefits not covered under the bare bones medicare. I would hate having a deductible. In fact, I hate everything about every welfare program I have ever studied. I wondered if Ryan was trying to accommodate the medicare fans. I hope he is not planning to reject the subsidies for private insurance policies for those who want private insurance.

On the medicare voucher: The medicare part B deductible is not just an unnecessary hardship, it's injury. It subjects people to financial and emotional injury.

The least Congress could do is eliminate the medicare part B deductible. People obviously do not realize that patients in California must carry their receipts from one doctor's office to another to prove that they already paid their medicare part B deductible. Otherwise doctors will either refuse to serve them or make them pay it again. Some of those people do not even recall that they already paid the deductible and pay it again—so trusting it’s pitiful. These people should not have to live every day with a calculator in their hand thinking about the government that made them so dependent in the first place, robbing medicare funds without consideration. Is it so necessary to impress upon them their disdained welfare status?

There are people on medicare part B who are denied medi-gap --the disabled, which includes people who became unable to continue working prior to the age of 65 and not medicaid people. It would be ludicrous to raise medicaid to encompass these higher income spikes.

In the 900 hundred or so comments on Krugman’s column that I scanned, I could not find a single one that criticized medicare as health care. There were Krugman opponents criticizing the cost of medicare to taxpayers. There were disgruntled Democrats promoting Canadian-style universal care, the public option or single-payer billing; but not one comment that criticized medicare as health care.

Shouldn’t there have been at least one voice devoted to spitting on medicare as health care? I'm the one?

Clearly many presume that medicaid in states here or there will provide what the overlooked need. Trust me--that will never happen in California. And here’s why:
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In California, HUD housing is the biggest business engine in the state.

Unfortunately, HUD does not offer REAL HOUSING VOUCHERS. It offers VOUCHERS FOR HUD HOUSING. HUD in California is a cartel.

The longer the lists of people waiting for HUD-approved apartments, the more apartment complexes must be built (or bought and renovated) to satisfy HUD government requirements, the more deals with real estate developers must be made, the more attorneys must be paid and the more work for HUD case-workers, who monitor and control the lives of the people in HUD apartments, including how many bedrooms, if any, they or their family can occupy and who can or can’t visit them for more than two weeks. The case-workers are often lazy, petty, condescending prima donnas who love training their masses in the 300 rules. In many areas, the entire Chamber of Commerce gets in on the HUD act such that the more poor people there are, the more money the trinity (bank, fast-cash, landlord) make—all for the good of the poor.

The voucher that is needed is the real housing voucher that has no connection with HUD. It should apply to any apartment/house/condo that meets building safety standards; but that inspection function should be separate from HUD. The government should not have the ability to set rent ceilings on the dwelling a renter chooses or be concerned with whom he/she is rooming. The government should not be seeking eminent domain due to HUD housing shortages.

If people above medicaid had housing vouchers based on their income, the HUD housing waiting lists would shrink, landlords wouldn’t have to do HUD paperwork and the people could probably pay their dental bills. Their health care tax credit would be smaller, but the choice would be worth it.

Ryan's basic approach is to reduce spending on social insurance which is the main source of income security for all but the most wealthy of older Americans.

Because he proposes minor increases in payments to the poorest of the poor and savagely cuts payments to everyone else he qualifies as "progressive" in your little world. In Ryan's world, as Walt Kelly observed many years ago, old people will all be equal - equal starvin.

In the mean time, it turns out that the cuts to social insurance will be used to free property income from taxation and lower tax rates for the richest.

Meanwhile those regressive payroll taxes will not be cut at all - in fact taxing health insurance will increase payroll tax revenues. But this will be "progressive" because the payments made by the middle classes into the system will be used only to pay for bare subsistence rather than financing a comfortable retirement.

And it will all reduce the deficit. Except of course if it doesn't in which case we will need to make entitlements even more "progressive".

Lets get real. I am a member of the self-reliant middle class and every day I have to pay with after-tax income all my health care bills including high deductable health insurance. Meanwhile government, union, corporations, and 501(c) employees are receiving supplimental TAX EXCLUSION HEALTH BENEFITS in the amount of 250 Billion Dollars annually (Wash Post). I am not here to pay for anyone's lifestyle. The good book tells me to help a brother or sister in need, not to support them for the rest of their lives in a manner they deem to be necessary with TAX EXCLUSION BENEFITS not attainable for the self-reliant under law. Make it equitable or get another polemic about whose obligation it is to help who with what. 54,846 pages of tax code only helps those who take advantage or
construe such pleonasm not those who work and save for contingencies.

For many, the issue is not primarily about the relative contributions of the rich and poor to the commonweal; it is about the total contributions needed to keep the system going (and the percieved inefficiency and the stagnant, preening power of bureaucrats). Truth be told, the government pays a huge amount to the wealthy as well as the less wealthy. Any pollster who cares to listen will find many tea party types willing to greatly reduce the outflows to the wealthy without huge reductions in outflows to the less wealthy. They will also find a willingness to reduce prison terms greatly as long as the justice that arrives is swift and sure - and the most noxious violent offenders are not released easily. This change would not show up as an increase in the average prison term, but instead a reduction in the cost and length of trials; the variance in prison term for the same crime.

These don't fit the stereotypes of 'conservatives' but they actually achieve the aims of the conservatives - discouraging crime through punishment, allowing people to eat the fruit of their labors in relative freedom.

Ahem. The payments to the lower income individuals would not increase from current law, so it's a stretch to say that anything is being redistributed toward them. The only thing that's changing is *how* the government is further enriching the wealthy. Under the current system, it's through non-means-tested entitlements. Under Ryan's system, it will be through huge tax breaks. I haven't run the numbers, but it seems likely that upper-income individuals would be far better off receiving tax breaks on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, even if it means they no longer receive as generous entitlements. So rich people would be better off, poor people would be either the same or worse off.

It doesn't hold water to say the tax breaks are regressive *but* the entitlement reforms are progressive, so it's a progressive plan, when the tax breaks constitute a larger portion of the plan than the entitlement reforms. If I wrote a plan which _eliminated_ both taxes and entitlement spending on upper income individuals, would that be "redistributive"?

The fallacy of Rand's philosophy lies in the belief that people will always act in their own rational self interest. People will, of course, always act in their own best interest. But people almost never act rationally when attempting to do so. Once you realize that she relies exclusively on their ability to do so, you soon see how incredible naive she was,

Hm. I somehow missed the second part of the paragraph on Medicare. For poor senior citizens, the plan would provide more benefits than current law (initially, at least). So my previous comment was inaccurate in that regard. Per the roadmap site, current Medicaid recipients would be removed from the program and in replacement given $2,300+$11,000=$13,300 to purchase insurance in the private market; the average health insurance policy cost is around that number, from what I can tell, but it will only continue to rise. So this represents a reduction of benefits from the current system for non-senior-citizen Medicaid recipients.

You refuse to address two things. First, there's the question of how a massive upward redistribution of post-tax income is going to solve this country's economic problems, when we have already been upwardly redistributing income for 30 years and at a time that investment-oriented tax cuts are scoring closer to zero than to the break-even point of one on a cost-benefit ratio. Whatever this country's problems are, overtaxing investment is not one of them -- investment-oriented tax cutting currently amounts to pushing on a string, otherwise known as pouring public money down a rat-hole. But clearly, lower-middle to middle-class Americans are paying very heavy taxes compared to the benefits they receive, and that depresses the economy for the vast majority of people.

Which brings me to the second problem with your analysis; the question of who is going to bring the budget deficit under control. Until the Republican Party honestly answers this, it is not fit to govern the country. The lower-middle to middle class can't afford to pay the bill and can't afford a current cut in their benefits. The practical solution would be to raise taxes on, and lower benefits for, the segment of the population whose incomes have gone up several times -- the top few percent -- while holding the line as best we can on benefits for everyone else. But you rationalize the Ryan plan, which lowers taxes on the very rich and purports to cover benefits for the rest. As it doesn't pass math muster even for a five-year-old, I can only assume that you've opted out of the real world altogether.

Redistribution of wealth is not the issue. Redistribution of political influence from all the people to a few of the people is the essence of party polarization, the separation of church and state, and the activist judiciary inserting personal values into it legal opinions.
If federal law applied equally to all, bribery and corruption would be culturally unacceptable. Today the government departments collude to serve special interests with the result that the people defend themselves by tearing away pieces of their liberties to survive in an unequal society.

Why does your post completely neglect the elimination of taxes on investment income in the Ryan plan ? This is obviously a major change with a highly regressive effect.

In order for the entitlement programs to survive they have to have buyin across the income spectrum of Americans. I can assure you that right now wealthy retirees are enjoying the extra income that social security affords them. A lot of working class Americans will never collect any social security at all because of shortened life expectancy due to hard work and in some cases toxic substances. Yet, they too strongly support the program. The efforts by republicans to tweak the system to make it more equitable is a cynical attempt to destroy social security system all together by pitting the various income classes against each other. Destroying the buyin for Social Security is a devious attempt to destroy social security which is the Republican’s ultimate goal.

Talk about obfuscation! It's simple! Ryan wants to lower taxes on the rich, continuing the trend of the last 30 years. He says he wants to keep overall tax receipts at the current % of GDP. Ergo, the poor and the middle class will have to pay more. All this blather about means tests, consumption taxes, and juggling of benefits does not change this basic truth. I strongly suspect that Mr. Douthat understands this. But ideologues do not care about facts, or the truth; they only care about advancing their ideology.

Fun and games with taxes. If you add the effect of all the conservative views on taxation the net result is more money kept in the hands of the wealthy. It is curious how they can convince themselves that everybody is better off if the wealthy can keep accumulating more wealth. The only fair way is to cover everything through progressive income taxes (Medicare, Social Security, etc) and to make the rates approach confiscatory levels when incomes reach obscene levels (like the $400 million paid to Exxon CEO), and short term capital gains should be treated the same as income unless immediately reinvested in start up businesses. That will take care of the Federal deficit, will require some sacrifice from those that benefit most from living in the US and good luck to those who think they will do better elsewhere.

are you kidding?? you (and ryan) certainly talk like rich people, an all-too familiar tone among conservatives. i agree with comment #4. also, none of you seem to realize that most people are five of six missed paychecks away from living on the street. those who benefit the most from our system should foot the bill for it (health care included).

Sorry Ross, your argument is a good example of a common fallacy (the fallacy of composition). Ryan's roadmap, taken as a whole, is regressive and makes the tax/benefit distributions more regressive than they are now (which is what the CBPP argues for, and is well documented by them). You, on the other hand, cite individual bits and piece of the roadmap that are progressive. But, of course, a few good apples doesn't make the whole batch good. Similarly, if a car has a few high quality parts, that doesn't lead to a high quality car. Better luck next time!

Paul Ryan is a rockstar. Unfortunately, his proposals and solutions are too intelligent and make way too much sense for Congress to adopt.