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Monday, September 10, 2012

Health Care Reform Articles -September 10, 2012


The Ryan Sinkhole

Unlike the Republican platform, which has mostly been ignored outside of the abortion issue, the Paul Ryan budget is the core document of the 2012 campaign. It is the most explicit expression of the Republican agenda, endorsed by the party's presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, and backed by decisive majorities of House and Senate Republicans.
That much is known. What people have not been talking about enough is that the Ryan budget contains an $897 billion sinkhole: massive but unexplained cuts in such discretionary domestic programs as education, food and drug inspection, workplace safety, environmental protection and law enforcement.
The scope of the cuts - stunning in their breadth - is hidden. To find the numbers, turn to page 16 of the Concurrent Resolution on the Budget - Fiscal Year 2013. In Table 2, Fiscal Year 2013 Budget Resolution Discretionary Spending, in the far right hand column, you'll see the nearly $897 billion figure, which appears on the line marked "BA" for Budget Authority under Allowances (920) as $896,884 (because these figures are listed in millions of dollars).
According to the House Budget Committee, of which Ryan is the chairman:
The federal budget is divided into approximately 20 categories known as budget functions. These functions include all spending for a given topic, regardless of the federal agency that oversees the individual federal program. Both the president's budget, submitted annually, and Congress' budget resolution, passed annually, comprise these approximately 20 functions.
Within the 20 "budget functions" lurks - at number 19 - "Function 920." In a masterpiece of bureaucratic obscurantism, the explanation provided by budget committee reads as follows:
FUNCTION 920: ALLOWANCES
Function 920 represents a category called "allowances" that captures the budgetary effects of cross-cutting proposals or contingencies that impact multiple functions rather than one specific area of the budget. It also represents a place-holder category for any budgetary impacts that the Congressional Budget Office has yet to assign to a specific budget function. C.B.O. typically reassigns the budgetary effects of any legislation enacted within Function 920 once a new baseline update is released.
The importance of the nearly $1 trillion in unexplained and unspecified cuts that Ryan and the Republican party are proposing, under the catch-all rubric of "Function 920: Allowances," cannot be overestimated. These invisible cuts are crucial to the Republican claim that the Ryan budget proposal will drastically reduce the federal deficit (eliminating it entirely in the long run) and ultimately erase the national debt.

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