No, not our new colleagues. A reader writes:
As an independent and a long-term fan of the Dish, I read with great interest your initial support for the Ryan budget plan (not without reservation but plainly with much enthusiasm), and your subsequent debate with many of your readers and pundits (ranging from David Frum to Paul Krugman) who cannot understand your enthusiasm for the Ryan plan. When reading your "defensive" posts, I understand and agree with your observation that Democrats need to have a full-throated response based on their values to compete with this (dreadful) Ryan budget. Agreed.
But the reason I think your readers cannot understand your reaction is that you do not acknowledge in any of your posts that this Ryan budget plan is mostly a political, and not an economic, plan.
Indeed, it is the culmination of about a thirty year Republican strategy called "starve the beast," by which Republicans have worked to reduce taxes and increase the national deficit as large as possible - all to create the supposed "deficit crisis" that we now face and to use that crisis to eliminate programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and a slew of other programs (EPA, SEC, Planned Parenthood, collective bargaining, etc.) that the Republican class has never been able to eliminate through the democratic process. This "starve the beast" Republican strategy has been openly acknowledged for years and I know you are well aware of it. And the Ryan "budget plan" is transparently an attempt to cash in on this long-standing political agenda.
So, frankly, why is there no acknowledgment by you of this?
There is, in as much as I have detailed my objections to a budget balancing plan that raises no new revenues. But the proposals on Medicare and Medicaid would undoubtedly cut costs over the long run, and would obviously inflict sacrifice on many Americans. That's why I remain of the view that the debate kicked off by Ryan is a good thing, because for the first time, the GOP has essentially owned and fessed up to the human costs of fiscal reform. From Reagan to W, with the great exception of George HW Bush, Republicans have told us we can have our cake and eat it. That's not the tone of Ryan's austerity. And that alone is worth something.
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