‘A Better Way’ Just Makes Things Worse

We just knew that House Speaker Paul Ryan’s latest tax reform proposal was going to be bad for working families.

Year after year, after all, Ryan has been bringing forward – in the name of fiscal conservatism – some variation of a plan to take from the poor and give to the rich. Now we have Ryan’s 2016 edition. Low and behold, this year’s plan, adorned with the snazzy title “A Better Way,” is … simply terrible.

Citizens for Tax Justice just released an in-depth analysis of the new House Republican plan. The main takeaway: This year’s plan would give an average annual tax break of nearly $800,000 to the top 0.1 percent. And when cuts to government programs are factored in, the group calculates, the bottom 95 percent of us would be “net losers.”

And the national debt that so-called deficit hawks profess to care so deeply about? That would go up another $4 trillion under the new Ryan plan.

We’ve come to expect this sort of tax policy from Ryan and his various conservative cohorts. Economist Paul Krugman likes to call the thinking behind it “invincible ignorance.” Ryan’s tax-cuts-create-growth mantra has been debunked time and again, ad infinitum. Yet here we are again.

Read the full write up in US News and World Report.