Like all congressional budget resolutions, House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan's (R-WI) fiscal year (FY) 2012 Budget Resolution is not simply a chart of preferred spending and revenue levels, it's also a political statement guided by ideology. And Ryan's ideology demands that the federal government divert ever increasing sums from middle- and low-income families to big business and high-income families.

On the revenue side, Ryan's budget revolves around locking down federal revenues to below 19 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). While this number is the average for the past 30 years, it has consistently lagged federal spending, resulting in the steep deficits we see today. In order to maintain this deficit-inducing level, Ryan's plan calls for cutting income taxes for high-income earners from today's top marginal rate of 35 percent to 25 percent. (Interestingly, the last time we saw federal budget surpluses, between 1998 and 2001, the top marginal rate was 39.6 percent.) Ryan plans a similar giveaway to corporations, slashing the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent.

The proposal also indicates that "large" tax expenditures should be eliminated to pay for tax cuts for the rich. It states that "deductions, credits and special carve-outs" in the corporate tax code should be modified to pay for tax cuts for businesses. Notably left out from the discussion of removing these tax code "distortions" is any identification of which tax expenditures Congress should nix. Far from being bold, Ryan's proposal ducks these critical questions, shifting the heavy lifting and political daring to the tax writing committees, staving off attacks from powerful special interests that will no doubt flex their campaign contribution muscles to retain their federal largesse.

In exchange for these tax cuts, spending for the old, the young, the poor, and the sick would be lopped off by two-thirds. Ryan laments the notion that the current social safety net is a "hammock, lulling able-bodied citizens into lives of complacency and dependency," while worrying about Medicaid health care providers "fleeing the system to escape endless red tape and underpayments." His solution is to apply the same failed "get-back-to-work-you-lazy-bum" policy that ended the old income assistance program and created Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF).

In fact, the welfare reform of the 1990s that is approvingly cited in the budget plan did nothing to curtail poverty, and it only managed to reduce welfare rolls by forcing low-income parents to take low-wage jobs A similar approach to health care, nutrition, and housing assistance will likely result in only cutting families off from these vital programs when they need it the most.

Headlining the section of Ryan's proposals to "strengthen the social safety" are $771 billion in Medicaid cuts. Ryan's plan would convert this low-income health care program from a system in which states and the federal government share costs into a block grant program that would allow states to abandon the eligibility and benefit guidelines currently in place. Ryan argues that relieving states of this "one-size-fits-all" approach would result in significant cost savings, allowing states to pay for higher-quality care. But this is just window dressing beautifying almost $800 billion in health care cuts to low-income families that will ultimately result in poorer health outcomes for millions of people.

Nutrition and housing programs are also prominently featured on Ryan's chopping block. Ryan is clear that far too many people have access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly "Food Stamps") and housing assistance. Applying a circular logic, Ryan insists that without kicking people out of these programs, the expenditures will be so great that people will have to be kicked out of these programs. Thus, he is just doing what will have to be done eventually. Yet cuts to health care, nutrition, and housing for low-income families is the bedrock on which Ryan builds his tax-cutting and corporate support programs.

Ryan's plan was formulated with the goal of allowing private corporations greater access to federal funds. At the front of this effort is a form of privatizating Medicare. He calls for use of “premium supports,” which means Medicare would be changed from an entitlement with defined benefits to an insurance system in which the government provides a fixed sum of money to individuals to buy coverage. The phrase “premium supports” is used because “vouchers” doesn’t poll very well today. But a rose by any other name is still a rose. By giving vouchers to seniors to pay for their own health care, Ryan's plan would insert a middleman between patients and health care providers, giving health insurance companies the ability to skim untold billions in federal health care spending.

Ryan's plan would also voucherize federal jobs programs by doing away with them and creating a "career scholarship" program that would have the effect of giving for-profit colleges a bigger bite of the national education and training budget. And although having little, if any, impact on the budget, Ryan's proposal calls for gutting the recently passed Wall Street reform – a boon to big banks who loathe the legislation – and removing sensible oil drilling regulations despite last year's BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

Security spending, however, would go untouched compared to President Obama's budget request, increasing compared to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) baseline. This aspect of the budget proposal makes it a rarity among the many floating around Washington – the president's deficit commission plan is clear in its call for "equal percentage cuts from both [defense and non-defense]". The Pentagon awards hundreds of billions of contracts to private corporations every year. Cuts to the Pentagon's budget as deep as those to non-security programs would have significant impacts on the bottom lines of the nation's biggest businesses. The Ryan budget keeps the taps wide open and continues to pump billions of dollars of federal funds to these contractors.

Despite claims to the contrary, Ryan's proposal would increase the debt in its first ten years. According to the CBO's analysis of Ryan's plan, in the first ten years after the enactment of his proposal, debt held by the public would actually increase compared to doing nothing. Under the hood of this clunker of a plan are draconian cuts to non-security spending that are less than the tax cuts that would be handed out to the rich and big businesses. The real cost savings in Ryan's plan come after the ten-year budget window that budget resolutions typically address. In 2022, the Medicare voucher system comes into effect, which essentially shifts health care costs from the government to senior citizens. In short, even with drastic spending reductions, the first ten years of Ryan's budget have no positive fiscal impact, while the out-years look improved because of radical Medicare cuts.

This is the budget of Big Business and the anti-government crowd. Ryan's budget doesn't dial back the laundry list of national priorities so much as it simply hacks away at the amount of resources devoted to accomplishing them. And in areas where he can, he opens them up to private corporations to skim funds as they flow from the Treasury to the provisioning of services. For what's left of programs operated by the federal government, Ryan's budget leaves a fraction of the funds necessary to implement an effective social safety net, protect the public, and invest in the economy as businesses and the wealthy contribute less.