The Progressive Caucus' 2012 "People's Budget" is a long overdue correction of the conservative policies that have eroded the middle class in the past three decades and which, through the Republican's 2012 budget resolution, would do further damage.

As Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi explains, "The last ten years or so have seen the government send massive amounts of money to people in the top tax brackets, mainly through two methods: huge tax cuts and financial bailouts. ... But the [deficit] issue is being presented as if the debt comes entirely from growth in entitlement spending. It’s bad enough that middle-class taxpayers have been forced in the last few years to subsidize the vacations and beach houses of the idiots who caused the financial crisis, and it’s doubly insulting that they’re now being blamed for the budget mess." ..

This budget will do more to reduce the deficit long-term than what the Republicans have proposed—without asking poor and middle-class families to bear all of the budget-cutting pain.

The People's Budget allows the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy to expire at the end of 2012, but extends marriage relief, credits, and incentives for children, families and education. It also rescinds the upper-income tax cuts in the December 2010 tax "deal," and incorporates the higher tax rates on millionaires from Rep. Jan Schakowsky's Fairness in Taxation Act, and the progressive estate tax from the Responsible Estate Tax Act cosponsored by Sens. Bernie Sanders, Tom Harkin, and Sheldon Whitehouse.

By contrast, the Republican budget plan crafted by Rep. Paul Ryan would cut the top tax rate from 35% to 25% — the lowest since 1931, back to a level not seen since the "good old days" before Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Media Matters' Jamison Foser adds that Ryan wants to cut taxes for corporations which are making huge profits, and some of which aren't even paying taxes. As a result, under Ryan's budget, the government would collect $4 trillion less in revenues over ten years. So, Ryan pays for those tax cuts by passing the costs on to working- and middle-class Americans.

The People's Budget increases revenue by $3.9 trillion, cuts primary spending by $869 brillion, cuts total spending by $1.7 trillion, and reduces the deficit by $5.6 trillion. It strengthens Social Security by lifting the cap on taxable earnings. (That is a proposal candidate Obama campaigned on.) As an added bonus, it includes something we haven't seen since 2001 — a budget surplus, this time to the tune of $30.7 billion by 2021.

Instead of dismantling Medicare, as Ryan's budget does, and throwing seniors into the private insurance market, where they would be forced to cover an increasing share of their health care costs, the Progressive Caucus would maintain the current structure and save significant costs by allowing Medicare to bargain with pharmaceutical companies for bulk rates, much as the Veterans Administration already does. Republicans have consistently opposed such a move.

Where the Ryan budget would cut infrastructure spending, close job training centers and limit funding for career education, the Progressive Caucus proposes spending $1.45 trillion in education, infrastructure, training, and research and development.

Instead of proposing increasing the Social Security retirement age or cutting benefits as Republican leaders have proposed, the Progressive Caucus budget would increase payroll taxes to the percentage of total wages they were set in the mid-1980s, when a bipartisan group crafted a compromise long-term Social Security solvency plan. Adjusting payroll taxes to cover 90 percent of taxable earnings, which was intended by that compromise, would alleviate nearly all of the concern about Social Security's long-term solvency.

The Economic Policy Institute, which analyzed and scored the People's Budget, called it "a sound alternative to Ryan's plan."

Economist Jeffrey Sachs said of the People's Budget, "This is the only budget that reflects what the American people really want," and have said we want in survey after survey.

"The Republicans often say that they want Congress to respect the voice of the people," Sachs wrote. "The voice of the people is crystal clear. In one opinion survey after the next, the public says that the rich and the corporations should pay more taxes. The public says that we should tamp down runaway health care costs through a public option, one that would introduce competition to drive down bloated private health insurance costs. The public says that we should get out of Iraq and Afghanistan and reduce Pentagon spending. (Just yesterday, Defense Secretary Gates let loose the predictable Pentagon canard that we should stay in Iraq if the Iraqi government asks for it. Better yet, we should respond to what the American people are asking for: to bring our troops home).

"The fact is that the People's Budget is the public's position. That's why it is truly a centrist initiative, at the broad center of the U.S. political spectrum. Ryan reflects the wishes of the rich and the far right. Obama's position reflects the muddle of a White House that wavers between its true values and the demands of the wealthy campaign contributors and lobbyists that Obama courts for his re-election. Many Democrats in Congress have also gone along with the falsehood that deficit cutting means slashing spending on the poor and on civilian discretionary programs, rather than raising taxes on the rich, cutting military spending, and taking on the over-priced private health insurance industry. Only the People's Budget speaks to the broad needs and values of the American people."

Ryan has been called "courageous" by some in the media, but taking the easy way out by trying to balance the budget on the back of the elderly, the disabled, children, working- and middle-class Americans, and the poor, is the opposite of courage. It is closer to the cowardly meanness of a schoolyard bully. Real courage is standing up for middle-class interests, as this budget does,  in the face of political crosswinds that favor catering to corporations and the wealthy.