NEOAVATARA

The Man With The Plan? Maybe...

The search for the perfect conservative platform started the day Barack Obama won the Presidency in November 2008.

And so far, I have not been sold.

Oh, sure, there are stable of adequate candidates.  But tell me, honestly, has any ‘wowed’ you yet?  I think not.  And each platform has its own liabilities.

But the best out there may be Paul Ryan’s Roadmap for America.  An overview of the plan and its legislative language can be read here.  And unlike many of Ryan’s detractors, Ryan has a complete CBO analysis which can be read here.

Now, look.  I am a Ryan fan.  Have been ever since he joined Congress after being elected in 1998.  I met him around that time in a Congressional meet-and-greet, and I have to say, even at that time I was impressed.

Now, many have reservations about Ryan’s Roadmap.  Most notably, this morning Erick Erickson of RedState coincidentally has his own piece on it.  And I agree, it is not perfect.  But in retrospect, either was Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America, nor was Reagan’s Presidential platform in 1980.

But here is what I generally like about Ryan’s plan:

1.  Health Care Reform:  Ryan’s plan echoes many of the ideas I stated a year and a half ago, before the debate on Obamacare even began.

• More individual control…less employer mandated healthcare.  A true transformation of the system, with the individual and not the state in control.
• It promotes auto-enrollment, to ‘nudge’ people into insurance plans if they are apathetic.
• It provides much more relief for small businesses, and is much less onerous on them, than Obamacare.
• Complete overhaul of the overburdened Medicaid and SCHIP programs.
• Real Medicare reform, actually confronting cost issues, unlike the Democrat plan.

2.  Overhaul of Social Security

• Individual accounts with personal ownership.
• Shifting the retirement age upward (an absolute necessity).
• Overall decreasing the cost burden to the state.

3.  Tax Reform

• A simplified (flatter?) tax structure, with less carve outs and exemptions.  A 10% rate below $100,000, and a 25% rate above that.  But that said, one can choose the current code or the revised one…it would be your choice.
• Repeal of the alternative minimum tax.
• Business consumption tax in lieu of corporate taxes.  This is on of Erick Erickson’s main complaints.  His argument is that this is a virtual VAT tax on business.  It sort of is.  But Erick is wrong in arguing that this is much different than what we have now.  Corporate taxes, in general, are consumption taxes.  I would much prefer that to what we have today, which is among the highest corporate taxes in the world.

4.  Budget Process Reform

• I would argue this will be the hardest to actually enact.  Both parties benefit from the nonsensical process we have today.
• Limiting the power of the purse of Congress (such as a supermajority for tax increases) is great, but I doubt it would ever happen.

Now, I think the biggest weakness in Ryan’s plan is the budgetary considerations.  Ryan is very conservative (small ‘C) when it comes to deficit reduction.  That said, Ryan is somewhat hamstrung because he is stuck using the Congressional Budget Office’s current numbers…which are always wrong.  If you think that Ryan’s less onerous regulations and taxes will provide long term growth, fiscal soundness will follow.  And one thing I am sure of:  Ryan would support more cuts if he can get the votes for them.

But even the CBO feels the Roadmap would at the very least put us on a sound path to fiscal sanity:

Using CBO’s “textbook growth” model, it is not possible to simulate the effects of the alternative fiscal scenario after 2058 because deficits become so large and unsustainable that the model cannot calculate their effects. The Roadmap would put the federal budget on a sustainable path, generating an annual budget surplus of about 5 percent of GDP by 2080.