We're so hosed - today's edition

In a blog post the other day, I posed the question, just exactly what about the Patty Murray budget plan would be superior to the Ryan plan?  Of course, the answer is "nothing," but let's head off any notion that that makes the Ryan plan the essence of what the country ought to do about its debt and deficit.  It's not. 

For one thing, the assumptions built into it don't sufficiently undo the damage wrought by this regime:

The U.S. population has been growing at 0.8% or 0.9% per year, and, the argument goes, federal outlays must grow by the same percentage.  There's some truth to this requirement -- more people means more Social Security checks.  But I'm not sure this needs to be a rigid ratio -- we don't build 1% more bridges to accommodate 1% more people.

In any case, the Ryan budget adds more than enough spending every year to keep pace with inflation and population growth.

The big problem with all this "responsible, balanced" spending is Ryan's starting point of $3.53 trillion.  The massive spike in spending under Obama -- "emergency spending to avert a worldwide financial meltdown" -- has become the new baseline, accepted even by the GOP.

Of course, the regime's propaganda arm made sure it was DOA anyway:

Our lazy, dishonest media, however, tell a different story.CNN: the Ryan budget "cuts taxes while balancing the budget over 10 years by slashing spending by $4.6 trillion."Mother Jones: "Rep. Paul Ryan's (D-Wisc.) 'new' budget slashes government spending levels to their lowest since 1948, with $4.6 trillion in cuts to things like Medicare, Medicaid and other programs for the poor."NYT: "By cutting $4.6 trillion from spending over the next decade ..."This $4.6 trillion number comes from comparing Ryan's budget not to reality (it increases spending), but to the CBO February 2013 Baseline, which lists $46.099 trillion in outlays over ten years.  Patty Murray's Senate budget proposes outlays of $46.362 trillion, so the revised story ought to be that Ryan wants to take $4.9 trillion away from struggling seniors and hungry children.

The ongoing hollow debate about the budget is like so much else about our current juncture: whether it's important for words to have meaning (think "marriage"), the plainly silly, indeed, infantile, proposals for addressing the false crisis of climate change, the ongoing outreach to a religion that will not disavow its violently radical adherents.  Plain truth and common sense recede into the mist and the conceit that the human species can re-invent itself becomes the order of the day.