Editor’s Note: Author Dayen says that Ryan’s budget is “made up of unicorns and rainbows:”

“By: David Dayen

“Ezra Klein has helpfully assembled a summary of the Ryan GOP budget. As you can see, while everyone’s talking about the privatization of Medicare and block-grant of Medicaid, there are plenty of other pieces worth discussing here even without any of that. Ryan would reduce discretionary spending to pre-2008 levels and freeze it for five years. He would repeal the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank entirely. He would block grant the food stamp program, giving a set amount of money indexed to inflation, regardless of economic conditions. He would eliminate all changes to Pell Grants, kicking them back to 2008 levels. And he would use the savings from all that to make the Bush tax cuts effectively permanent, but actually do worse than that, by changing the tax code to lower the top individual and corporate tax rates to 25% and making up the revenue on the poor.

“So this is a pretty pathetic budget. And it also happens to be a complete fiction. The numbers are not to be trusted at all. Ryan assumes $1.4 trillion in savings from health care repeal when the Congressional Budget Office scores repeal as increasing the deficit. He uses “dynamic scoring” to perpetuate a fiction that tax cuts will increase tax revenue. He sets unrealistic spending caps without determining how to get there or how future Congresses not bound by his budget will abide by them. Worst, he assumes a world-historical low unemployment rate based on a Heritage Foundation study that claimed the Bush tax cuts would lead to the same kind of prosperity (hint: they didn’t). Indeed, by 2021, Ryan assumes a 2.8% unemployment rate, which is how he achieves the revenue needed to make the numbers work. Included with this projection is an implausible housing boom. Jim Tankersley and Katy O’Donnell, middle-of-the-road journalists, say in their headline that the plan “pushes optimism to the outer limits.”

Read Dayen’s full article here.