Quote:If the House and Senate passed a budget resolution, they could then start the reconciliation process, which allows the Senate to vote on measures related to fiscal policies without the possibility of them being filibustered and with a limited ability for them to be amended. The bills can address spending — including on programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps —taxes and the debt limit.

Ryan and other Republican lawmakers could use this process to push through their desired changes to the tax code. The tax plan Ryan put forward in June would lower the corporate tax rate, lower rates for the wealthy, and repeal the estate tax. An analysis of the plan found that 99.6 percent of its benefits would go to the richest 1 percent of Americans, leaving just 0.4 percent for everyone else. It would also cost the government $3.1 trillion over a decade.

They could also pass their proposals for Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps, and rental assistance. Ryan recently proposed instituting strict work requirements for food stamps and housing assistance that could mean throwing people off the rolls if they can’t fulfill the new conditions. His recent agenda includes block-granting Medicaid, which would cut the program by billions and leave tens of millions of people uninsured, and replacing the current guarantee of health care coverage under Medicare with a voucher to purchase private health insurance.

Meanwhile, Republicans are likely to gut key parts of the Affordable Care Act this way, as they have already tried to do only to be thwarted by a veto from President Obama.

It seems likely that a President Trump would then sign the measures. One of Trump’s economic advisers, Larry Kudlow, told Politico that passing a tax package through reconciliation would be “not good, fabulous” and “the fastest way in our judgement to get necessary pro-growth tax reform.” He’s been encouraging Trump to use the procedure and he said Trump’s team is considering it.

Reconciliation has been deployed 20 times by both parties, including Republicans pushing through President George W. Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 and Democrats pushing through the final version of the Affordable Care Act in 2010. But Republicans expressed widespread outrage about its usage in the latter instance: Ryan himself called it “an extraordinary and unprecedented abuse” and a “convoluted legislative charade” and said, “Never before has the House committee process been so grossly exploited.”

Quote:The Better Way repeals most of Obamacare, from the individual and employer mandates to the Medicaid expansion to subsidies for consumers to purchase insurance. It would cut at least $6 trillion in federal spending, with 62 percent of that coming from programs that help low- and moderate-income families. It would “block-grant” a number of anti-poverty programs, giving fixed sums to the states to manage without any federal restrictions (and without the ability to get expanded funding based on need). It would raise the Medicare eligibility age to 67 and cripple the program by offering “premium support” for seniors to buy private insurance, fracturing the market and breaking a system that works pretty well. And Ryan’s plan would cut individual and corporate tax rates, with 99.6 percent of the benefits going to the wealthiest 1 percent.

Reporters and pundits have historically gone to bat for Ryan, exalting him as a legitimate thinker trying to solve problems rather than a dangerous ideologue. Politifact helped negate Democrats’ Medicare attacks by calling them the 2011 “Lie of the Year.” Nobody in Congress gets more loving profiles, dating from before he became the Veep nominee or Speaker to the present day. That Ryan’s budgets were mainly snake oil, that his plans would have dire consequences for every American without a trust fund, usually get edited out of the story.

Even today, the media assists Ryan when he tries to distance himself from Donald Trump—when in reality, Trump would likely be little more than an autopen as president, signing whatever noxious policy Ryan shuttled through the House and put on his desk. Despite this, the media almost affords him sympathy for his plight about dealing with Trump (he’s campaigning with Trump on Saturday, so it can’t be thatwrenching), rather than recognizing his role as the author of the agenda the next Republican president will carry out..

Quote:On the other hand, Marcus said, "I'm supporting him because I cannot envision Hillary Clinton in the White House and cannot support what she's going to do to the economy." Marcus said in a previous interview with Fox Business that the US would "go down the drain" if Clinton were elected. Marcus founded Home Depot in 1978, and he was the company's first CEO. He served as chairman of Home Depot's board until retiring in 2002.

Quote:In the James Room of the Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace Hotel, Erick Sager is demonstrating what happens when you admit that people die. Half-lit by PowerPoint, he explains that a seminal 1998 paper on the ideal level of government debt relies on an infinitely lived agent—it assumes that people are immortal.

Sager, an economist for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, speaks in surprisingly plain English. He’s added to that 1998 paper, he says, “by relaxing the assumption that people are infinitely lived.” Economists call this a “life cycle” approach, and it produces a dramatically different result. Rather than hold debt, his life cycle analysis suggests governments should hold savings. For the U.S., that’s a swing on the order of $20 trillion.

Republicans have long argued that economic growth from tax cuts should be fed back into the model, year by year. They call this approach “dynamic scoring” or “macroeconomic analysis.” For the first time, macroeconomic analysis will likely prevail in next year’s official scores for major revenue bills from the JCT. Some Democrats, who’ve been suspicious of an approach that makes tax cuts look cheaper, are slowly warming to the same idea for appropriations bills. It could make infrastructure spending look cheaper, too.