Rounding Up the Ryan Budget: Bad Numbers and Cost-Shifting

I wrote a lot about the magic behind Ryan's budget and GOP economic strategy yesterday, so I'd like to round up some of the smart commentary and analysis about it.

After half the national media descended on their obviously ridiculous employment projections, Heritage scrubbed the numbers from their report - seriously shameful stuff. Here are the links (via Krugman):

As of yesterday.

As of today.

Paul Krugman did a lot of work over the past two days breaking apart the economics and showing the of Ryan budget. As he writes, the part that hasn't gotten enough coverage is the fact that

the biggest source of supposed savings in the plan isn't actually health care, it's an assumption that federal spending on everything except health and Social Security can somehow be squeezed, as a percent of GDP, to a small fraction of current levels. 

Ezra Klein explains why Ryan's projections of health care costs over time are completely unrealistic, and makes this very important point:

This is an important point: there's difference between cutting costs and shifting them. As the Congressional Budget Office noted, a lot of what Ryan's budget does is shift costs from the federal budget to someone else's budget: Medicaid's costs moves to the states, and then when the states cut it, to the people who need it, or to their families. Medicare's costs move to seniors, or to the families of seniors. The budget doesn't have a clear theory for how to spend less on health care. It has a clear theory for how the federal budget can spend less, and other people can spend more. But that's not good enough.

If you like the gory details, the Congressional Budget Office has analyzed Ryan's budget. It's not pretty.

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities President Robert Greenstein describes how two-thirds of Ryan's cuts come from low income programs.

While Paul Ryan and Alice Rivlin worked together on some Medicare reforms, she does not support the version he ultimately included in his budget, despite his implications to the contrary.

There's been a lot said and written in the last day describing Ryan's budget as an honest effort to address a major problem. Half the Members of Congress standing with Ryan yesterday called it "fact based." David Brooks wrote, "His proposal will set the standard of seriousness for anybody who wants to play in this discussion."

Here's the problem with all of that: the Ryan budget is simply not honest. The numbers in it and the economic analysis it relies on are wrong. You don't just get to put a bunch questionable numbers together, say it handles our deficit and debt issues, and declare victory. The tough part is that the plan has to actually handle the issues, and probably shouldn't do so on the backs of the most vulnerable. (One of the core principles of the Bowles-Simpson effort was to protect the truly disadvantaged.) So if Ryan sets the standard for seriousness, that standard is incredibly low.