Paul Ryan's Budget is Pretty Much a Catastrophe on Every Level

TPM looks deeper into the details of Rep. Paul Ryan's budget and finds yet another reason the GOP has been avoiding it like the plague: it actually increases the deficit:

[The Tax Policy Center] estimates that even with its middle-class tax increases, the plan would reduce federal revenues to 16 percent of GDP in 2014. Because the tax cuts for the wealthy would dwarf the tax increases for the middle class, the Ryan plan would allow the federal debt to continue growing for a number of decades to come, despite its steep cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

So to recap: the brilliant Republican plan to end the deficit slashes social programs like Social Security and Medicare, increases taxes on the middle class and yet somehow still increases the size of the deficit.

Bravo!

MORE: Yglesias has more:

[T]he plan would also likely destroy the private health insurance system in the United States by eliminating the tax preference for employer-provided health insurance plans. This tax preference is not very good public policy, but it’s a hidden government intervention that’s critical to making our “private” insurance system work, insofar as it works at all. Without it, absolutely everybody is going to wind up on a totally dysfunctional individual market. For rich people, who’ll be getting a giant tax cut, this is fine since just paying out of pocket will be a small price to pay for Ryan’s massive enrich-the-rich tax policy. For everyone else it’s a problem.