CNBC — Republicans have a new plan to repeal Obamacare — and here it is

Republican lawmakers have a new plan to repeal and replace Obamacare in a bid to bridge the gap between the House Freedom Caucus and moderates, according to a document obtained by CNBC....

A Freedom Caucus source told CNBC the changes to the health bill would secure 25 to 30 "yes" votes from the Freedom Caucus, and the new bill would get "very close" to 216 votes. The source said that 18 to 20 of those "yes" votes would be new.

Two senior GOP aides told CNBC no vote is scheduled for next week, but a discussion is expected via conference call on Saturday....

CNBC
Republicans have a new plan to repeal Obamacare — and here it is
Berkeley Lovelace Jr. and Kayla Tausche

Gabriel Sherman — Why Steve Bannon Might Be the Winner of the GOP’s Health-Care Civil War

The failure to repeal and replace Obamacare would be a stinging defeat for Trump. But it would be an even bigger defeat for Paul Ryan, who has all but staked his Speakership on passing this bill. And in the hall of mirrors that is Washington, the big winner to emerge out of the health-care debacle could be Steve Bannon. That’s because Bannon has been waging war against Ryan for years. For Bannon, Ryan is the embodiment of the “globalist-corporatist” Republican elite. A failed bill would be Bannon’s best chance yet to topple Ryan and advance his nationalist-populist economic agenda.…

Palace intrigue.

New York Magazine
Why Steve Bannon Might Be the Winner of the GOP’s Health-Care Civil War
Gabriel Sherman

Chye-Ching Huang — Ryan Makes It Clear That Cutting Medicaid to Pay for the Health Bill’s Tax Cuts for the Wealthy Enables Deeper Corporate Tax Cuts in Tax Legislation to Follow

House Speaker Paul Ryan has made a key Republican motive for pushing ahead with the House GOP health plan explicit in recent interviews:[1] passing the health package first facilitates deeper tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations in subsequent tax legislation.
That’s because the House GOP health plan reduces revenues by nearly $900 billion over the decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), including $592 billion in tax cuts largely for the wealthy. Passing these tax cuts now as part of a health package allows the GOP to offset their cost through cuts to health care spending — particularly in Medicaid, which CBO estimates the House health care bill cuts by $880 billion over ten years. If these tax cuts were part of tax reform legislation rather than being in the health bill, Republican leaders would have to offset their cost on the tax side to maintain revenue neutrality, as they have said they would do, limiting how sharply they can cut tax rates.

Instead, because these tax cuts are in the health bill, Republicans can, in writing their tax bill later this year, make much deeper cuts in tax rates — particularly for corporations — than they otherwise could do....

Soak the poor.

House Republicans intend to enact both their health and tax packages using a special budget process called “reconciliation.”[4] The key advantage is that reconciliation bills cannot be filibustered in the Senate and so can pass with a simple majority vote, allowing Republicans to pass their health and tax packages without needing the support of a single Democrat. But reconciliation bills must meet certain criteria, including that they not increase the deficit after the ten-year budget “window.” The House GOP health plan meets this standard because it pays for its revenue losses with deep cuts to health coverage for low- and moderate-income families, especially Medicaid.

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
Commentary: Ryan Makes It Clear That Cutting Medicaid to Pay for the Health Bill’s Tax Cuts for the Wealthy Enables Deeper Corporate Tax Cuts in Tax Legislation to Follow
Chye-Ching Huang | Deputy Director, Federal Tax Policy with the Center’s Federal Fiscal Policy Team

Lou Dobbs — Speaker Paul Ryan Should Resign

Here it comes.

Breitbart News
Lou Dobbs: Speaker Paul Ryan Should Resign

Neil Munro

Juliegrace Brufke — Paul Ryan: Tax Credits In Obamacare Repeal Are Not An Entitlement

Ryan said the tax credits are different from the Affordable Care Act’s federal insurance subsides based on income, arguing the credits would give individuals the freedom to purchase the plan they feel is best without the government forcing people to buy insurance.

“No, that’s not an entitlement. Letting people keep more of their own money and doing what they want with it is not an entitlement,” he said. “If you think letting people keep more of their own money and letting them do what they want with it is an entitlement, then you must believe this is Washington’s money.”

The Daily Caller
Paul Ryan: Tax Credits In Obamacare Repeal Are Not An Entitlement
Juliegrace Brufke | Capitol Hill Reporter

Note: the ACA individual mandate is front loaded, requiring everyone to have insurance or be liable for a penalty. The Ryan plan is back loaded, not requiring participation but adding a penalty in the from of a higher premium for each period that a person chooses not to remain uninsured.

Will Rahn — Commentary: The GOP's coming civil war

Washington Republicans, with their tax-cutting zeal and love of open markets, always saw the GOP base as an extension of themselves. This is the major reason that they never thought Trump could win the primary, let alone the general.

And it was the hope of Ryan’s fellow ideologues that Congressional Republicans would essentially run the government, at least from a domestic policy standpoint, once the GOP retook the White House. As the conservative power broker Grover Norquist said in 2012, the job of the next Republican president would be “to sign the legislation that has already been prepared.”

The legislation is indeed ready to sign. But when Norquist made that comment, it’s unlikely he was imagining Trump would be the guy with the pen.

How much of the GOP agenda is Trump really willing to expend political capital on?….

Bannon, meanwhile, has a habit of describing politics as a zero-sum game between competing groups, namely working- and middle-class Americans versus an ascendant elite class. And the populism Bannon talks about is, in a sense, neither left nor right, and instead all about serving the interests of the downwardly-mobile.

“Trump is a builder,” as Bannon said to Bloomberg’s Joshua Green this fall. “And what he’s built is the underlying apparatus for a political movement that’s going to propel us to victory on Nov. 8 and dominate Republican politics after that.” 

And this movement, Bannon has made clear, is not about enacting the Ryan agenda. It’s about displacing Ryanism, and the whole modern conservative project, with populism and economic nationalism.

To paraphrase Old Blue Eyes, "When an irresistible force meets and immovable object, something gotta give, something's gotta give, something's gotta give…"

CBS News
Commentary: The GOP's coming civil war
Will Rahn, political correspondent and managing director, politics, for CBS News Digital

John Amato — Trump Tosses Veiled Threat At Paul Ryan During Wisconsin Rally

Trump continued his "thank you tour" with a rally in Wisconsin yesterday, where he compared Speaker Paul Ryan to a fine wine. He said, "I'll tell you he has been terrific and you know, honestly, he's like a fine wine. Every day goes by I get to appreciate his genius more and more."

You would think that should be good news or the Speaker since he's had many public spats with president elect Trump and he's not popular with alt right Trump supporters.

However, Trump followed that up by saying, "Now, if he ever goes against me I'm not going to say that."

In other words, you're great until you disagree with me and if that happens, I'll destroy you in the media....

Crooks and Liars
Trump Tosses Veiled Threat At Paul Ryan During Wisconsin Rally
John Amato

Zero Hedge — The Narrative Changes: Republicans "Pour Cold Water" On Trump's Massive Stimulus, Will Block Tax Cuts

Republican lawmakers warned "that there could be a major obstacle to enacting President-elect Donald Trump’s agenda: the national debt."

“I was disappointed that it wasn’t brought up in the campaign — anybody’s campaign really — it really wasn’t mentioned,” Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) said of deficits and debt. “So I’m very concerned about it. It’s going to be tough to address if there’s no push from outside of the Congress,” he added. “I’m very concerned about it. It’s the biggest problem we face, by far.”

“We did not hear anything about entitlement reform from either of the candidates, and that’s a serious issue,” said Michael Sargent, a research associate at The Heritage Foundation. “You cannot address the growth in spending without addressing entitlement issues.”...

As Bloomberg explains, Trump’s race to enact the biggest tax cuts since the 1980s went under a caution flag Monday when during a news conference, "Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell warned he considers current levels of U.S. debt “dangerous” and said he wants any tax overhaul to avoid adding to the deficit."…

“What I hope we will clearly avoid, and I’m confident we will, is a trillion-dollar stimulus,” he said. “Take you back to 2009. We borrowed $1 trillion and nobody could find that it did much of anything. So we need to do this carefully and correctly and the issue of how to pay for it needs to be dealt with responsibly.”

Then there is the debt limit, which will need to rise next year to avoid defaulting on government obligations; McConnell said he wasn’t sure if that would be paired with any deficit-reduction measures next year as it was in 2011, when Republicans held the debt limit hostage and extracted more than $2 trillion in deficit cuts over a decade from President Barack Obama.

House Speaker Paul Ryan has also said he wants tax changes to be deficit-neutral, indicating that Republicans will assume positive macroeconomic benefits from tax cuts to ease the projected budgetary hit - a process known as dynamic scoring that is popular on the right.…

Finally, even if all the changes are implemented immediately, and the GOP rolls over, virtually none of Trump's stimulus package will generate any impact on the economy until some time in 2018 as Goldman calculated last week.…

Trumponimics DOA?

Zero Hedge
The Narrative Changes: Republicans "Pour Cold Water" On Trump's Massive Stimulus, Will Block Tax Cuts
Tyler Durden

Austin Frakt — The GOP could kill traditional Medicare without premium support. Here’s how.

More importantly, it’s deep in the weeds. Lots of Americans would not understand what had happened.

The ideal political approach to anything controversial.

The Incidental Economist
The GOP could kill traditional Medicare without premium support. Here’s how.
Austin Frakt

Menzie Chinn — Speaker Ryan Assesses Fiscal and Monetary Policy Efficacy

From The Hill: "Instead of crediting Obama for any of the economic gains that have occurred in the last seven years, Ryan argued that the Fed’s policies pushed the recovery. He added that the central bank’s controversial efforts to drive down borrowing costs may have driven growth, but the benefits failed to spread to everyone."

I find it interesting that Speaker Ryan credits the Fed, because six years ago, he warned of inflation arising from quantitative easing and Federal deficits.…

Econobrowser
Speaker Ryan Assesses Fiscal and Monetary Policy Efficacy
Menzie Chinn

Robert Reich — Paul Ryan’s 7 Terrible Ideas

Yesterday, the new Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, summed up his House Republican agenda – vowing to pursue legislation that would frame a stark choice for voters in 2016.





“Our No. 1 goal for the next year is to put together a complete alternative to the left’s agenda,” he said.

Despite the speech’s sweeping oratory and careful stagecraft, Ryan clings to seven dumb ideas that are also cropping up among Republican presidential candidates.
Here they are, and here’s why they’re dumb:

Voodoo economics. Cut taxes, slash social spending, privatize, and penalize the poor and elderly, in short, funnel munnie to the "job creators."

Robert Reich

Paul Ryan’s 7 Terrible Ideas

Barkley Rosser — VSPs Get Their Way With Budget Deal: Social Security Benefits Are Cut

Military spending increases, SS benefits decrease. Who's winning?

Econospeak
VSPs Get Their Way With Budget Deal: Social Security Benefits Are Cut
J. Barkley Rosser | Professor of Economics and Business Administration James Madison University

It's gonna be Ryan at Speaker

Word coming in now is that we will get Ayn Rand boy, Paul Ryan, as Speaker of the House. He decided to go ahead after forcing his fellow Republican dogs to genuflect to him on everything. He's in. Ayn Rand must be celebrating, somewhere. Sociopath. Psychopath.

Atlas Mugged...Paul Ryan set to become Speaker of the House. Galt Gulch here we come.

Looks like Ayn Rand/Austerity boy, Paul Ryan, is about to become Speaker of the House. He has forced Republicans to submit to total compliance to his rule.

Here comes Galt Gulch. End of Medicare as we know it. Vouchers. Privatizations. Social Security "reform" a.k.a. benefit cuts, etc, etc.

Dean Baker — Paul Ryan: Top Republican Budget Wonk, Wants to Shut Down Air Traffic Control System, Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health and Every Other Non-Defense Portion of Government

US "emerging" into the Third World?

Ryan essentially proposed eliminating virtually all of the federal government by 2050 according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis of his plan that was done under his direction. According to CBO's analysis (page 16), under his plan in 2050 government spending on the military, infrastructure, law enforcement, research, and all non-health forms of income support, would be 3.5 percent of GDP. This is roughly equal to current levels of military spending, a level that Ryan and other Republicans have indicated they want to maintain. The implication is that Ryan would shut down just about all other parts of the federal government.

It would be more informative to readers if the NYT told them what Ryan's "thinking and philosophy" is rather than devoting an article to praising him for having one.

Beat the Press
Paul Ryan: Top Republican Budget Wonk, Wants to Shut Down Air Traffic Control System, Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health and Every Other Non-Defense Portion of Government

Dean Baker

Obama wants Paul Ryan as Speaker

In case you had any doubts that Obama was a fiscal hawk, a true fiscal conservative, who has done more to harm working people and the Middle Class than anyone before him (maybe with the exception of Bill Clinton, but he's close), then just look at who that backstabbing traitor in the White House wants as Speaker of the House. None other than Ayn Rand poster boy, Paul Ryan.

“The White House would like that idea,” Allen said during an interview with Laura Ingraham on her radio show today. “Because they would like one more win … what they’ve always told me is that they admire Paul Ryan for being a substantive, smart guy.

Yeah...right...a substantive, smart, guy. He thinks the government ran out of dollars.

Ryan, of course, is for cutting Social Security, ending Medicare and turning it into a voucher program and cutting taxes for the wealthy.

Obama never ceases to amaze how far to the right he can go and how deeply tied to the interests of the wealthy and big corporate he really is.

Paul Krugman — Money Makes Crazy

You see, in the conservative worldview, markets aren’t just a useful way to organize the economy; they’re a moral structure: People get paid what they deserve, and what goods cost is what they are truly worth to society.… 

Modern money — consisting of pieces of paper or their digital equivalent that are issued by the Fed, not created by the heroic efforts of entrepreneurs — is an affront to that worldview. Mr. Ryan is on record declaring that his views on monetary policy come from a speech given by one of Ayn Rand’s fictional characters. And what the speaker declares is that money is “the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. ... Paper is a check drawn by legal looters.” 

Once you understand that this is how many conservatives really think, it all falls into place. Of course they predict disaster from monetary expansion, no matter the circumstances. Of course they are undaunted in their views no matter how wrong their predictions have been in the past. Of course they are quick to accuse the Fed of vile motives. From their point of view, monetary policy isn’t really a technical issue, a question of what works; it’s a matter of theology: Printing money is evil.

And the corollary is the gold and silver are virtue.

Paul Krugman gets this very right. It's a moral issue with some people since money and morality are joined at the hip if not synonymous. Which the basis for the double standard that allows those with wealth to follow different rules than those that don't have wealth, moral worth being equated with financial worth.

BTW, notice that Krugman uses the term "modern money."

Economist’s View
Paul Krugman: Money Makes Crazy
Mark Thoma | Professor of Economics, University of Oregon

Mike the Mad Biologist — Republican Rep. Paul Ryan Wants to Create Massive Government Bureaucracy

Essentially, what Paul Ryan wants to do is create a government bureaucracy to monitor these ‘contracts’ (or, maybe monitor the Social Contract?). Conservatives have spent the last forty years railing against this very thing. Of course, people will disagree about whether they hit these ‘benchmarks’, so we’ll need to hire people to adjudicate that process. More ‘big government.’ It also opens people up to the predations and whims of ‘petty government bureaucrats.’

Republican Rep. Paul Ryan Wants to Create Massive Government Bureaucracy

Mike the Mad Biologist

(h/t Mark Thoma at Economist's View)

What Mike the Mad Biologist overlooks is what's in the back of Paul Ryan's mind. He clearly has no intention of creating a new government bureaucracy, which is against everything he stands for. What he wants would be a quasi-judicial system, privatized and run by business to discipline workers and teach them how to work.

Matt Bruenig — How Reform Conservatives Like Reihan Salam and Paul Ryan Misunderstand Poverty

Oh boy. Reihan Salam has a piece riddled with confusions, some conceptual, some technical, and some just downright strange. It is so confused that I will eschew the normal narrative type reaction and just go line-by-line.

"Confusions" might not be the right word. Inexcusable ignorance or intentional lying?

Demos Policy Shop
How Reform Conservatives Like Reihan Salam and Paul Ryan Misunderstand Poverty
Matt Bruenig

whoknu — The most important thing you will learn about Social Security today

MMT.

Job well done.

Daily Kos
The most important thing you will learn about Social Security today
whoknu