Harold Myerson has the best analysis so far of the mean-spirited Paul Ryan GOP budget proposal.

You should read Myerson’s whole essay (“Who’s hurt by Paul Ryan’s budget proposal“), but in the meantime, here are a few choice excerpts:

If it does nothing else, the budget that House Republicans unveiled Tuesday provides the first real Republican program for the 21st century, and it is this:

Repeal the 20th century.

Republicans have never particularly warmed to the American social contract that governed most of the past hundred years. Its central elements, enacted during the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, assumed a level of collective national responsibility for the well-being of the elderly and children, the two groups who could not benefit directly from employment, through such programs as Social Security, Medicare, funding for schools and for college grants and loans.

[…]

The cover under which Ryan and other Republicans operate is their concern for the deficit and national debt. But Ryan blows that cover by proposing to reduce the top income tax rate to just 25 percent. He imposes the burden for reducing our debt not on the bankers who forced our government to spend trillions averting a collapse but on seniors and the poor. The reductions in aid to the poor, says the budget blueprint that Ryan released, will be made “to ensure that America’s safety net does not become a hammock that lulls able-bodied citizens into lives of complacency and dependency.” That’s a pretty good description of America’s top bankers, but Ryan’s budget showers them with tax cuts.

[…]

There’s talk that we have a president who’s a Democrat — the party that created the American social contract of the 20th century. Initially, he focused on reshaping and extending that contract into the 21st. Now that the Republicans want to repeal it all, he’s nowhere to be found. Has anybody seen him? Does he still exist?

Read full article: “Who’s hurt by Paul Ryan’s budget proposal“