Blog: TAPPED

At Newsweek, Jesse Ellison has a harrowing story on sexual assault against men in the military. I highly recommend the whole thing, but I found these tidbits particularly interesting: [I]t is the high victimization rate of female soldiers—women in the armed forces are now more likely to be assaulted by a fellow soldier than killed […]

It is widely believed that Paul Ryan chose to exact his most severe spending cuts on Medicaid because its low-income beneficiaries vote Democrat if they even turn out for elections, so cutting a program that benefits them won’t hurt the GOP too much at the polls. Unfortunately, eliminating $207 billion in spending, the amount Ryan’s […]

An indicator of how powerful Paul Ryan and his budget proposal have become: All three evening newscasts did a separate piece on Paul Ryan last night averaging more than 2 minutes each — significant in newscasts that are under 28 minutes long. On the other hand, President Obama came on the air for 15-second soundbites […]

The Cutline’s Joe Pompeo tells how on Tuesday, The New York Times’ Arthur Sulzberger Jr. was asked about the impact of the paper’s paywall on low-income readers. His answer: “Just translate that question to print,” he said. “How will low-income people get access to the New York Times in print? Imagine we were 20 years […]

So far, I’ve focused most of my attention on Paul Ryan’s proposed cuts to Medicaid and Medicare, but it’s worth noting the extent to which the “Path to Prosperity” provides sharp tax cuts for corporations and the rich. In addition to keeping the Bush tax cuts, Ryan’s plan would further lower the top marginal rate […]

Among the many problems with Paul Ryan’s draconian budget plan is the idea that federal spending can and should be capped at 20 percent of GDP. Let’s start with why the “should” part is problematic. Like the president’s budget commission, which called for capping spending at 21 percent of GDP, fiscal conservatives make the assumption […]

Despite the inexplicable praise it’s gotten from some moderate quarters — including this delicious, if inadvertent, parody of David Brooks by Jacob Weisberg — the Ryan budget plan is just remarkably bad. It is an attack on the poor and lower middle class premised — as Paul Waldman points out below — on utterly ludicrous […]

Jamelle Bouie says the “Path to Prosperity” is just the standard Republican agenda — cut taxes on the rich on the backs of the poor. Monica Potts asks where the Religious conservatives who profess to care about the poor are when the poor need help most. Ben Adler points out that Paul Ryan’s budget cuts […]

The NYT has an article today on a census study by the Brookings Institute that shows that the number of white children in the United States, currently a majority, is declining faster than expected and expected to drop into a minority over the next decade.

In what might be the Slateiest piece I’ve read in a long while, Jacob Weisberg defends Paul Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” as “brave, radical and smart:” If the GOP gets behind his proposals in a serious way, it will become for the first time in modern memory an intellectually serious party—one with a coherent vision […]