House Votes to Shift Funds from Medicaid to High-Income Households

In approving (235-193) House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan's (R-WI) proposed budget resolution. The spending blueprint, if enacted, would turn Medicare into a voucher program and drastically cut Medicaid funding as a means to cutting income tax rates for upper-income households (from 35 percent to 25 percent). Although the plan has no chance of becoming law, it does illustrate the Republican-controlled House's priorities - namely tax cuts for the rich and spending cuts for low-income programs and seniors.

You can read our detailed analysis of the plan here.

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.

Image by Flickr user ctj70181 used under a Creative Commons license.

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