The interactive map below may take a few seconds. It will be worth your wait.
Select from the dropdown box for a list of items you can chart. You can also hover over any of the orange or blue boxes for a popup display comparing the budgetary difference between the Obama and Ryan proposals for that year, for that item.
Boxes in blue are years in which Paul Ryan has budgeted more for an item than President Obama. Boxes in Orange are the reverse.
Straight Up Comparison
Numbers for President Obama come from Whitehouse Budget Summary Tables page 174 (PDF page 6).
Numbers for Paul Ryan come from Path to Prosperity Table S-3 on PDF page 64.
The category items are identical except Ryan has an extra item for Global War on Terror. To equalize, we added Global War on Terror to Security.
Without making any judgment to the contrary, let's assume Ryan and Obama can both "deliver". Here are a few charts depicting the results. You can produce the same charts above via the dropdown boxes and hover functions (minus my anecdotes).
Deficit: Obama vs. Paul Ryan
Paul Ryan made good headway for three years, then fell flat for another 7. This is no way to shrink the national debt or reduce interest on the national debt as we shall see in a moment.
Obama's proposal is abysmal. He made some progress for a few years, then went into reverse.
Medicare: Obama vs. Paul Ryan
Amazingly Paul Ryan want to spend more on Medicare than president Obama every year for the next 10 years. To be fair, Ryan takes a big bite out of Medicaid for six years starting in 2016.
Security: Obama vs. Paul Ryan
I labeled this as "defense", they both called it "security". Is the "security" label an attempt to make the huge numbers seem more palatable?
Regardless, Neither Ryan nor Obama is interested in doing anything about one of the most bloated items on the budget.
Moreover, President Obama is the biggest war-monger in history judging from his proposed budget. Democrats should be shocked to see the president propose to spend more than Ryan every year for a decade.
I was reasonably confident the president would reduce military spending. He didn't. His scorecard is thus a perfect zero. President Obama has not done a single thing right.
It's not easy being perfect, even perfectly wrong.
Interest on the National Debt: Obama vs. Paul Ryan
The above chart shows the effect of cumulative failures to shrink the deficit.
Note that in 2021 president Obama proposes to spend over $900 billion a year on interest on the national debt. This is sickening, not amusing.
Paul Ryan would have us spending $687 billion on interest in 2021. His deficit proposal for 2021 is $731 billion.
National Debt: Obama vs. Paul Ryan
The above chart is where the rubber meets the road. For all the brouhaha surrounding the deficit reduction plans, both are a miserable failure.
President Needs a New Head
In 2021, under Ryan's proposal, the national debt will soar from $14.973 trillion to $23.105 trillion. Interestingly, that is not that much better than what the president put together as shown above.
Ryan needs to reduce more, way more, or raise revenue. There is no other way. I propose a good hard look at military spending.
Obama needs a new head. The one he has cannot think at all. His proposal to send the deficit into reverse starting in 2014 and spend close to $1 trillion a year on interest on the national debt is proof enough.
Contact Congress
Please send your congressional representatives an email or fax and a link to this post and demand they read it. We are on a path to self-destruction even IF we were to pass Ryan's budget.
Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
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