I'm still reading the Republicans' alternative budget (pdf), but I did want to highlight this odd graph from Republican Paul Ryan's Wall Street Journal op-ed on the subject:
This graph supposedly compares "Democratic Budgets" and the Republican Alternative based on spending as a percentage of GDP between 1980 and 2080. As you can see, Democratic spending is, as they say, off the charts after about 2060.
Now I think it's perfectly fine for Paul Ryan and the House Budget Committee's Republican staff to make whatever crazy assumptions they want about Democratic spending. No one has to take them seriously. But I don't think they can say that this is "based on CBO's Long-Term Alternative Fiscal Scenario" unless the CBO has actually done an analysis that runs through 2080. As far as I can tell, the Congressional Budget Office hasn't done any such analysis. But they have scored the Obama budget through 2019, and it looks like this:
As near as I can tell, Paul Ryan and his staff just took the CBO projections that ended in 2019 and drew a random line, extending upward at about a 45 degree angle, until 2080.
Fuzzy math? I'm shocked. Let me save you the trouble of reading the R budget. The shorthand version is if we can just cut taxes again and again, everything will be just fine.
Give them credit for(finally) thinking up an alternative instead of complaining I guess. But it is certainly suspect.
Marc,
I'd bet that they are extrapolating from the long-term budget outlook that CBO did in December 2007: http://cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=8877. If you look at it, it has a baseline and an alternative scenario that project out to 2082, so they probably took Obama's budget and after about 2030. If you look at Table 1-2 in the pdf, spending under the alternative fiscal scenario it is at 29% in 2030, and 41% in 2040. The rise in spending is entirely driven by rising entitlement health care costs that were not first introduced by the Obama budget. That Republican spending scenario is ridiculous though, unless they are severely limiting entitlement spending. I haven't read the budget yet, but somehow I doubt they have a plan to limit the growth of medicare spending.
They actually have an ingenious plan to fight entitlement costs. Just don't pay for it! They plan on giving an lump sum subsidy to senior which won't rise with healthcare costs. In other words, they don't plan on reforming Medicare so much as just killing it off. Oh, and let's just pretend that the crushing healthcare costs will simply go away and won't completely crush the lower and middle class.