The 152-member House Republican Study Committee (RSC) released its alternative budget last week, and it was both a doozy and a political gift to Democrats. 

As the Washington Post's Henry Olsen pointed out, the budget wasn’t exactly brimming with fresh ideas but rather a repurposed bunch of pre-Trump hits from Paul Ryan’s 2008 “Roadmap for America’s Future.” Ryan’s main plan was to slice and dice spending until almost nothing was left of the federal government other than a vague hint of light outlining a skeleton crew of workers who managed to fend off an army of spiders threatening to overrun the place. 

In that vein, House Republicans are now proposing slashing spending by $14 trillion over the next decade in order to balance the federal budget. “We’ve faced a year of unprecedented spending,” they wrote in a letter organized by RSC chair Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana, noting that the federal government had spent over $7.6 trillion since March of last year—spurred mainly by the pandemic. Apparently, House Republicans forgot they were also the party that helped Trump single-handedly add nearly $8 trillion to the national debt during his four years in office, which was also pretty unprecedented. 

And where might they find that windfall in savings, you ask. Well, look no further than the tip of Paul Ryan’s nose: entitlements! Otherwise known as cutting the nation’s already porous social safety net—specifically for older Americans in this case. 

“The age at which one receives full Social Security benefits would go up to 69 by 2030, from a planned rise to 67 in 2022,” writes Olsen. “Medicare’s eligibility age would rise from 65 to 69. Combined, these increases would likely keep many aging Americans in the workforce for years more than they expect or desire.”

Ah, yes, forget all that planning you’ve been doing—69 is the new 65!

Now there’s a winning GOP slogan for 2022. 

But House Republicans don’t just want to raise the age of eligibility for Medicare, they also want to fundamentally transform the program so that it no longer includes guaranteed services. Instead, retired Americans would get a subsidy they could use to pay for their insurance plans or a new “Fed Plan” that would replace Medicare as we once knew it. In other words, people would have to cover out of pocket any shortfall between the federal subsidy and their plan’s premium. 

“Scrap Medicare!"—another GOP winner for 2022.

Oh, also, “Scrap Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Affordable Care Act!” House Republicans want to package those up into block grants they can then gift to the states, who can then do whatever they please with them in order to balance their own budgets. Gee, wonder if GOP-run state legislatures will find a way to leave constituents holding the bag.  

Anyway—it’s all there in writing. The party that blew an $8 trillion hole in the federal debt is looking around for savings and realized the easiest thing to do was to put voters on the hook for their costly mismanagement. 

“We make the mistakes, you just pay for them!"—another 2022 GOP gem!

Seems like something Democrats might want to spend a little time on while they’re campaigning to keep control of the House in the midterms. House Republicans—nearly three-quarters of whom signed off on this plan—definitely have electoral advantages heading into next year, their ideas aren’t one of them.