Paul Ryan's plan to gut the federal government as we know it

That's how it's described by the New Yorker's James Surowiecki, and it boils down to the Republican's perverted view that aside from fighting wars, the federal government is worthless.

His plan is not an evenhanded attempt to solve America's long-term budget problems. It's a profoundly radical document, its proposals skewed by ideological biases. Raising taxes, of course, is out of bounds. The same goes for using federal power to hold down Medicare costs, which will be the key driver of future budget deficits. Instead, House Republicans would cut spending on almost everything else the government does. According to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, the Ryan plan would, by 2050, reduce federal spending to its lowest point, as a percentage of G.D.P., since 1951. And since an aging population, with rising health-care costs, means that a hefty chunk of government spending will be going to retirement and health-care benefits, hitting Ryan's target would require drastically shrinking everything else.

Ryan doesn't exactly hide his hostility to government, but he's adept at downplaying the impact that his proposed cuts would have on people's lives. Thus the part of the plan titled "Repairing the Social Safety Net" in fact calls for huge cuts in spending on Medicaid, food stamps, Pell grants, and so on--all of which will unquestionably damage the social safety net and make life harder for millions of Americans. This is about as disingenuous as calling a company's downsizing initiative "Boosting Our Labor Force." Reforming the welfare state is a reasonable goal. But when Ryan explains that he's doing things like cutting Medicaid in order to help "the less fortunate get back on their feet" one hears echoes of Judge Smails, in "Caddyshack," explaining that he sentenced young criminals to death because "I felt I owed it to them."

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Ryan's uncharacteristic munificence toward defense requires his cuts elsewhere to be even more draconian, effectively starving most of the rest of the government to death. The C.B.O. analysis of Ryan's plan, for instance, finds that, by 2050, all the government's discretionary spending, including defense, would represent just 3.75 per cent of G.D.P. Given that defense spending in the postwar era has never been less than three per cent of G.D.P., and that Republicans won't consider cutting it, the rest of the government's discretionary spending would have to be squeezed out of that remaining 0.75 per cent. This is a derisory number--in the entire postwar era, it has never been less than eight per cent. In practical terms it would make most of what the federal government does--from maintaining infrastructure to air-traffic control, environmental regulation, and crime fighting--unaffordable. Ryan's path to prosperity, in other words, is a path that ends with the federal government spending its money on health care, Social Security, and the military, and little else.

In its current makeup, this proposal has zero chance of passage. But without a Democratic president and Senate, the picture could quickly change. That's the scary part.