Mitt Rom­ney may rue the day he called Wis­con­sin Rep. Paul Ryan’s bud­get pro­pos­al ​“mar­velous,” as if he were describ­ing a splen­did buf­fet at the man­sion of a friend. The plan from the influ­en­tial, youth­ful Repub­li­can chair of the House bud­get com­mit­tee does offer peo­ple like Mitt and his rich bud­dies tasty good­ies – $10 tril­lion in pre­served and fresh mil­lion­aire-friend­ly tax cuts (over a decade), to be fol­lowed lat­er with roll­backs in finan­cial, envi­ron­men­tal and every oth­er regulation.

Ryan and Romney say they want to reduce the deficit, but keep all the Bush tax cuts, eliminate almost all discretionary spending except for the military and cut the top tax rate to 25 percent.

But if Pres­i­dent Oba­ma is polit­i­cal­ly vul­ner­a­ble on the weak recov­ery of the econ­o­my, Rom­ney will be increas­ing­ly vul­ner­a­ble in the pres­i­den­tial race for embrac­ing Ryan’s plan – if the Democ­rats make clear the dan­gers it pos­es for the vast major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans, the ser­vants at Romney’s ​“mar­velous” pol­i­cy buf­fet. Declar­ing the pres­i­den­tial race stark­ly as a ​“make-or-break moment for the mid­dle class,” Oba­ma told Asso­ci­at­ed Press edi­tors in April that in the much-dif­fer­ent bud­gets he and Ryan have pro­posed, vot­ers face a ​“choice between com­pet­ing visions of our future [that] has [not in recent mem­o­ry] been so unam­bigu­ous­ly clear.”

The Ryan-Rom­ney plan is fur­ther to the Right – and more hurt­ful to aver­age Amer­i­cans – than any­thing from Ronald Rea­gan or Newt Gingrich’s Con­tract with Amer­i­ca, Oba­ma said. Call­ing it ​“thin­ly veiled social Dar­win­ism,” he argued that his ​“cen­trist” approach has his­tor­i­cal­ly drawn sup­port even from Repub­li­cans, from Lin­coln to Eisen­how­er, who saw gov­ern­ment as a way to ​“do togeth­er what we can­not do as well for ourselves.”

Few Amer­i­cans may know what social Dar­win­ism means, though many – espe­cial­ly the rich – do believe supe­ri­or peo­ple nat­u­ral­ly dom­i­nate soci­ety through harsh com­pe­ti­tion. (On the oth­er hand, we can hope the anti-evo­lu­tion reli­gious Right will stay home in Novem­ber rather than vote for Rom­ney, a dis­ci­ple of Dar­win – even if 19th-cen­tu­ry Eng­lish philoso­pher Her­bert Spencer was the real social Darwinist.)

But polls gen­er­al­ly show large majori­ties sup­port­ing Medicare, which the Ryan bud­get would dras­ti­cal­ly weak­en, and a wide range of gov­ern­ment activ­i­ties, such as oper­at­ing nation­al parks or pro­tect­ing the envi­ron­ment, which the bud­get under­mines. And they favor high­er tax­es on the rich, not new tax cuts for them.

Two major pit­falls endan­ger Obama’s attempt to cap­ture the cen­ter and label Rom­ney the right-wing extrem­ist: He offers vot­ers a plan tilt­ed more to a lim­it­ed defense of exist­ing gov­ern­ment pro­grams than to bold, inspir­ing ini­tia­tives on the econ­o­my. (He should adopt more of the House Pro­gres­sive Cau­cus bud­get or even Sen. Tom Harkin’s more lim­it­ed Rebuild Amer­i­ca Act.) And he fails to chal­lenge Rom­ney sharply enough on a gen­er­al vision of what gov­ern­ment can offer, pre­fer­ring instead to bur­nish his cre­den­tials on shrink­ing government’s size and reach.

But even if adopt­ing Ryan’s plan may hurt him with cen­trists and inde­pen­dents, could Rom­ney have resist­ed? With only four House Repub­li­cans vot­ing against Ryan’s bud­get and no Democ­rats for it in late March, he had to prove not only his right-wing cre­den­tials but also – what now amounts to the same thing – his main­stream par­ty loy­al­ty. After all, as anti-tax, anti-gov­ern­ment zealot Grover Norquist told The Econ­o­mist, Romney’s own ideas are almost irrel­e­vant: ​“We want the Ryan bud­get. We … just need a pres­i­dent to sign this stuff.”

The path to austerity

The Ryan bud­get will not only fail to do what it claims, but in most cas­es will do just the oppo­site. As New York Times colum­nist Paul Krug­man put it, the bud­get is ​“the most fraud­u­lent in Amer­i­can history.”

Ryan (and Rom­ney) say they want, above all, to reduce the deficit, but they keep all the Bush tax cuts, slash the bud­get to elim­i­nate almost all dis­cre­tionary spend­ing except for the mil­i­tary and cut the top tax rate to 25 per­cent (now 35 per­cent, sched­uled to rise to 39.6 per­cent). They promise to pay for the low­er rate by elim­i­nat­ing tax loop­holes or expen­di­tures, but fail to spec­i­fy any – thus effec­tive­ly increas­ing bud­get deficits, accord­ing to the Con­gres­sion­al Bud­get Office.

Under the guise of cut­ting deficits and pro­tect­ing health and retire­ment secu­ri­ty, Ryan-Rom­ney would change fed­er­al health insur­ance to reduce fed­er­al costs but only by shift­ing the bur­den back to indi­vid­u­als – espe­cial­ly the aged and poor – not by increas­ing effi­cien­cy. The bud­get would raise the eli­gi­bil­i­ty age for Medicare in the future and replace Medicare with vouch­ers, turn over Med­ic­aid to the states with inad­e­quate, declin­ing block grants, and inval­i­date most of the Afford­able Care Act, includ­ing its expan­sion of Med­ic­aid. As a result, as many as 27 mil­lion peo­ple would lose Med­ic­aid cov­er­age (accord­ing to the Urban Insti­tute), and 33 mil­lion unin­sured will not gain insur­ance promised through the Afford­able Care Act. Also, although the recent­ly passed House bud­get only steers Con­gress toward chang­ing Social Secu­ri­ty, Ryan clear­ly envi­sions at least par­tial pri­va­ti­za­tion and a high­er retire­ment age – increas­ing both eco­nom­ic inse­cu­ri­ty and inequality.

Ryan and Rom­ney claim the tax cuts focused on cor­po­ra­tions and the rich – sor­ry, ​“job cre­ators” – will boost employ­ment, but com­par­ing the eco­nom­ic records of the Clin­ton and Bush II admin­is­tra­tions sug­gests that rais­ing tax­es on the rich can some­times yield more jobs than cut­ting them. After review­ing a wide range of stud­ies, Cen­ter on Bud­get and Pol­i­cy Pri­or­i­ties (CBPP) tax ana­lyst Chye-Ching Huang con­cludes, ​“There is no strong evi­dence tax­es on high incomes affect growth strong­ly neg­a­tive­ly or positively.”

‘ Robin Hood in reverse’

With their bud­get and gov­ern­men­tal revamp, Rom­ney promis­es Amer­i­cans free­dom and Ryan pre­dicts a new moral­i­ty. (The bud­get is called ​“The Path to Pros­per­i­ty: Restor­ing America’s Promise.”) But for most Amer­i­cans their plan would mean greater inequal­i­ty, which leads to less free­dom and a more amoral social order.

“[T]his bud­get is Robin Hood in reverse,” CBPP Pres­i­dent Robert Green­stein says. ​“It would like­ly pro­duce the largest redis­tri­b­u­tion of income from the bot­tom to the top in mod­ern U.S. his­to­ry and like­ly increase pover­ty and inequal­i­ty more than any oth­er bud­get … pos­si­bly in the nation’s history.”

Already, the rich – and vir­tu­al­ly the rich alone – are rebound­ing from the Great Reces­sion, with the top 1 per­cent cap­tur­ing 93 per­cent of the income gains in the first year of recov­ery, accord­ing to econ­o­mist Emmanuel Saez of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley. But under Ryan’s plan, accord­ing to the Tax Pol­i­cy Cen­ter, a cen­trist think tank, the aver­age mil­lion­aire would get a new $265,000 tax cut (on top of $129,000 from extend­ed Bush cuts), while after-tax income would fall for house­holds earn­ing $30,000 a year or less (and at the same time, 62 per­cent of all Ryan’s cuts come from pro­grams ben­e­fit­ing low­er-income house­holds). Low­er­ing incomes, remov­ing insur­ance, increas­ing indi­vid­ual bur­dens and boost­ing inse­cu­ri­ty does not pro­vide most Amer­i­cans more free­dom, but impris­ons them in eco­nom­ic anxiety.

Greater inequal­i­ty also increas­es ill­ness and mor­tal­i­ty, reduces social and eco­nom­ic mobil­i­ty, low­ers long-term eco­nom­ic growth, under­mines democ­ra­cy and con­tributes to high­er crime rates. And recent­ly a team of researchers, main­ly from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, found through sev­en dif­fer­ent stud­ies that upper-class indi­vid­u­als are more like­ly to behave uneth­i­cal­ly – lying, steal­ing, cheat­ing – than the less afflu­ent. Such behav­ior may be a major con­trib­u­tor to their wealth, but it also demon­strates that once they are wealthy, peo­ple are much less moral, and much more pow­er­ful. It’s a mes­sage appar­ent­ly lost on right-wing Christians.

But it may not be lost on all Amer­i­cans. Even Ryan faces a strong polit­i­cal chal­lenge from for­mer busi­ness­man and Demo­c­ra­t­ic politi­cian Rob Zer­ban in a once-Demo­c­ra­t­ic dis­trict. And Rom­ney now car­ries the bag­gage of a plan that does pre­cise­ly the oppo­site of what he claims into a cam­paign against a pres­i­dent who seems will­ing to take that mes­sage to the elec­torate all year long.