Trees and flowers are beginning to bloom anew. Hunters and Timberlands are being shelved in favor of Top-Siders and sneakers. And, this past weekend, students were ecstatic to experience the year’s first weekend of 50-plus degree weather.

These occurrences can only point to one thing: It’s budget season — the annual political free-for-all that is the drafting of, debate about and voting on the budget resolutions composed by the White House and each major congressional caucus.

Sounds exciting, doesn’t it?

Not really. But it provides yet another opportunity to delve into — with the utmost scrutiny — the nonsensical, ignorant and cruel Republican worldview and economic ideology.

For the past three years, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin — former running mate of Mitt “Mittens” Romney — has been charged with formulating the GOP’s annual budget. He’s been lauded by the press as a “budget expert” and “policy wonk,” which would be appropriate descriptors if he actually knew how to do math.

Remember how Mitt and Paul, if elected, were going to cut taxes but magically raise tax revenue, without specifying the mechanisms by which they’d do so? Well, besides a vague promise to “close loopholes,” but that means absolutely nothing because rich people and corporations love loopholes too much for Republicans to touch them. That’s pretty much the gist of the newest edition of the so-called Path to Prosperity, the 2014 GOP budget resolution, which passed the House by a party-line vote on March 21. It’s built on nothing.

Let’s take a look at its nothingness. The budget slashes, cuts and decapitates the social safety net with the ruthlessness of Jason Voorhees. The Path to Prosperity would eliminate the Affordable Care Act, the landmark health care reform bill that expanded Americans’ access to health insurance to a near-universal level. Ryan and the right wing of the Republican Party (which pretty much means every member of the Republican Party nowadays) also intend to turn Medicare into a voucher system for everyone born after 1959, despite strong opposition from the public. That system would send seniors lump-sum payments that they could use towards either Medicare or a private insurance provider, rather than allowing them to enroll in the efficient and effective traditional fee-for-service program. But these payments wouldn’t automatically adjust for inflation and increases in health care costs and would eventually leave seniors priced out of the market.

He would cut Medicaid, the government-run health care system for the poor and disabled, by $757 billion over the next 10 years, and other welfare programs would be slashed by nearly a trillion dollars.

Worst of all — for students, at least — the GOP budget would raise the interest rate on federal student loans from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent and makes substantial cuts to already reduced expenditures in education. During the 2010-2011 school year, 68 percent of the undergraduate population at the University of Illinois received some sort of financial aid, and 44 percent paid for their education with the assistance of federal Stafford loans. And need I remind Rep. Ryan that we’re already in a hiring crisis? More than half of recent college graduates are unemployed or underemployed (meaning that they’re bussing tables or working at Kinko’s rather than utilizing their college degrees), and to further add to their financial burden in the name of deficit reduction is, to put it as nicely as I can, unbelievably heartless.

Incredibly, Ryan hopes to pair all of these cutbacks in discretionary spending — and remember, this is all in the name of reducing the oh-so-problematic annual deficit — with tax cuts. He would simplify the tax system into two brackets, 25 percent and 10 percent, which would create a markedly flatter means of income taxation. Let’s sum this up: The GOP sees a problem with the disparity between federal income and spending, and rather than find a reasonably balanced approach to solving that problem, they eschew all notions of equity in favor of letting rich people (the job creators, you know) keep more of their money.

All of these proposals are fiscal expressions of Ryan’s desire to wean Americans off of their supposedly unnecessary reliance on the government. He sees Medicare, Medicaid, welfare programs and Social Security (a program that partially funded his college education after his father died) as enabling “takers” and impeding the ability of “makers” to drive economic growth. His budget is not concerned with minimizing our deficit so much as effectively taking away our government’s ability to play a beneficial role in society.

Hubert Humphrey, the great liberal senator from Minnesota, said that the “moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life … those who are in the twilight of life … and those who are in shadows of life.” If their budget is any indication, the Republicans — for all of their holier-than-thou religious posturing — are fully intent on constructing a thoroughly immoral government.

Adam is a freshman in LAS. He can be reached at [email protected].