House Conservatives Offer Up New Budget Full Of Really Great Ideas That Everyone Loves

Oh good, we had grown tired of making fun of Paul Ryan and his "budget," so it's nice that the Republican Study Committee (RSC), chaired by Chairman Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA, of COURSE), has released its own budget for us to make fun of. Highlights include: turning Medicare into a voucher system, raising the retirement age to 70, and repealing Obamacare. Here, let us give you a summary for you to make fun of and enjoy!

Medicare

We must ruin Medicare to SAVE Medicare (p. 66) which is why this budget will turn it into a voucher system. If we don't do it now, we'll have to cut it down the road, so might as well just destroy the whole thing and get it over with.

Unions

If you work for the Feds, there will be no union business on "official time," (p. 70) whatever that is, so let this be a warning to you!

Readable Legislation

Reading is hard, you guys. Like, really hard, you know? We should make it easier to read legislation with the Readable Legislation Act of 2013 (p 70.)

EPA

The EPA is cute and all, but it's best if it has an ornamental function. So let's go on ahead and "prohibit it from promulgating any regulation concerning, taking action relating to, or taking into consideration the emission of a greenhouse gas to address climate change." (p. 71) New York, New Orleans -- it's been real, you guys, but you're on your own.

Medicaid

Let's go ahead and ruin that too, why not? It will turn the "Federal share of Medicaid spending into a flexible State allotment tailored to meet each State’s needs, indexed for inflation and population growth (p. 78)." (True, that doesn't sound so bad in isolation, but the next sentence talks about how much "freedom" the states will have, and also the "flexibility" they will get, so which generally refers to screwing Poors, so we are Suspicious.)

Oh and it also freezes spending for a few years, reinstates the Bush Tax Cuts, and eliminates the National Labor Relations Board, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Public Broadcasting. Sound good? Of course it does, who needs a government: just buy a gun and start a bootstrap-selling business, it is the American way.

Anyway we can be flippant about this because it has no chance in hell of passing (today, anyway, this could change next week, you never know with this group). If only we could have had a national election, wherein we would vote on our appetite for such things and reject the candidate presenting these kinds of ideas. Let's do that, actually. Let's have an election and vote on the ideas we like best, and then maybe the ideas we don't like will go away once and for all.

 [RSC Budget (pdf)]