From Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post:
* Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is getting involved in the presidential race — sort of. He’s emailing supporters asking for money to run ads in Iowa defending his budget and urging 2012 candidates to support it. The Democratic National Committee has been painting Ryan’s budget as “extreme” in Iowa ads, Ryan wrote that he wants to launch a “counter-attack.” It’s an unusual move for a non-candidate.
There are few things more annoying than trying to compete against someone who won’t play the game.
In today’s Wall Street Journal, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) expresses the frustration of many conservatives who want a real debate about the purposes of government and our ability as a nation to fund them. Ryan rightly chides President Obama for failing to engage in specifics about how to focus policymakers’ attention on the debt, not just its ceiling.
It is mystifying to me that the president continues to shut out Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” proposal as a middle ground between bankrupting Medicare and Medicaid and eliminating them altogether.
One would think The One could see a Clintonian moment when presented. But rather than see Ryan’s willingness to preserve the social safety net for what it is – a path to a long-term bipartisan solution – the president can’t see past his own partisan nose.
Yet instead of laying out his own vision, President Obama continues to offer speeches instead of specifics. Lots of us want a debate about the ends of government, and how we structure our economy to pay for it. If the leader of the Democratic Party won’t engage in a serious debate about it, maybe the Democrats should get someone who will.
In February, President Obama unveiled his irresponsible deficit-inflating 2012 proposed budget. By April, Obama hastily said “never mind,” scrapped that proposal and offered a vague Budget 2.0 speech after Congressman Paul Ryan (R – Wisconsin) embarrassed him by unveiling his debt-cutting budget roadmap.
The problem is that the so-called leader of the Free World was too afraid to offer any specificity whatsoever, focusing on his reelection instead of the nation’s intensifying fiscal emergency. At a House Budget Committee hearing last week, Rep. Ryan asked Congressional Budget Office (CBO) chief Douglas Elmendorf whether the CBO had yet been able to estimate Obama’s latest “budget.” Elmendorf’s not-so-subtle reply:
We don’t estimate speeches. We need much more specificity than was provided in that speech for us to do our analysis.”
Come to think of it, a lot of voters probably think back to the 2008 presidential campaign and say the same thing.
Medicare Part D is a good model for the Ryan Medicare plan.
To be clear up front: Congress was wrong to pass Medicare Part D, the prescription drug program, without more broadly reforming Medicare. As a new entitlement, it is extremely costly, and has exacerbated the government’s debt problem.
That said, the free-market aspects of the plan — the private-sector competition part of it, without a government option — have worked beyond almost the wildest dreams of free marketers. The liberals were so sure that costs to seniors and the government would rise astronomically without government there to “negotiate” premium” prices that they originally proposed to have government “set” the premium price at $35 with a built-in hike each year for inflation. Lo and behold, in the third year of the program it turned out that the average premium price was still down below $25, ten dollars less than what the libs had wanted to set as the base price. In other words, competition worked to keep prices about 30% lower than government planners had predicted. What the libs wanted as a limit would instead have been a huge burden. When the libs in 2007 tried desperately to append a government “negotiation” provision to the program, the attempt was filibustered to death in large part based on those amazing early results. Thank goodness. Competition, as usual, had worked wonders, and it was not to be messed with — which is why the Dems made no serious attempts thereafter to force the government negotiation option back onto the table. Even four years later, the average premium still is $30, or five dollars below what the libs assumed could be achieved only by government intervention.
It is true that some people have cherry-picked statistics to claim that premiums are skyrocketing, but that’s only because they pick the sorts of plans whose costs have risen, not the average of all plans. James Capretta explains it well today at NRO.
Meanwhile, as Capretta explains, the cost to government — meaning to you and I, Joe Taxpayers — is a whopping 31% less than had been projected. Now, granted, that’s still a ton of money that should not have been spent unless it was part of a larger Medicare overhaul that used competition to save money on the rest of the program as well, but even so, the overall lower costs are a tribute to the virtues of competition.
Moreover, as Rick Santorum explained in the GOP presidential debate last week, the Medicare reforms in Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget proposal are based largely on the competitive aspects of Medicare Part D. They basically apply Part D’s system to all of Medicare — which means they could serve to produce a huge majority of seniors who are satisfied with the program, at a remarkably lower cost.
That’s why and how the Ryan plan can be politically sellable — because seniors happy with Part D can be expected to react at least somewhat favorably to a plan modeled on Part D, as long as the connection is made clear.
Deroy Murdock has a great column up this week. He credits my wise friend Jim Guirard, veteran of many a battle on Capitol Hill, for proposing better marketing language for Paul Ryan’s Medicare proposal (or variations thereof).
Jim Guirard, long-time chief of staff to the late Sen. Russell Long (D., La.), runs the TrueSpeak Institute (TrueSpeak.org). He advises the GOP to market “MediChoice.” Unlike the head-scratching that “premium support” inspires, MediChoice signals that Republicans would give seniors choice in medical coverage. Just as the GI Bill helps veterans pay tuition at schools that match their interests, MediChoice would help future Medicare recipients (now 54 or younger) buy coverage that suits their circumstances.
Guirard urges Republicans to call today’s Medicare system “MediCrash.” The Democrats’ policy — snatching $520 billion from Medicare to fund Obamacare and pretending that the program is the platonic form of fiscal health — invites financial catastrophe. By Sept. 30, 2020, the Congressional Budget Office forecasts, Medicare’s Trust Fund will be “exhausted.” Republicans should reiterate that Democrats — not the greedy, granny-killing GOP — perpetrated a half-trillion-dollar heist against Medicare’s coffers to underwrite Obamacare. Democrats pitifully refuse to do anything to prevent this calamity. What will their negligence yield in just over nine years? The CBO predicts: MediCrash.
Note, in the Murdock column, his photo at the bottom of a potential MediChoice notice that every senior citizen would receive. Talk about bringing home to them the essential idea that THEY and nobody else controls their choice of a health-care plan! Great idea.
In the debate last night, Rick Santorum made the excellent point that what Ryan proposes is what ALREADY is working, in popular fashion, in the otherwise problematic Medicare Part D. If seniors can make such an individual-option plan work for prescription drugs, why not for their whole health-care coverage?
I noted the same analogy here, back on May 5. As I also explained:
[B]ecause of very similar, consumer-based, market-oriented provisions, has cost the government far less money than projected while costing consumers remarkably less in premiums than even the most optimistic number-crunchers expected. In short, the experience of Medicare Part D suggests that Ryan is hardly being outlandish to say that giving control back to consumers in a market-based system can save money without harming benefits – and thus preserve Medicare for future generations.
Now, back to Murdock. As he noted, Ryan’s plan is hardly radical:
Republicans should remind mewling Democrats that economists in liberal thinks tanks came up with the idea in the first place. The Brookings Institution’s Henry J. Aaron and the Urban Institute’s Robert Reischauer fathered “premium support” in 1995.
Former senator John Breaux (D., La.) promoted this reform as co-chairman of President Clinton’s bipartisan Medicare-overhaul commission…. Former senator Bob Kerrey (D., Neb.) echoed Breaux. As he told Reuters in May 1999: “You’re much better off letting 50 million people make decisions on their own than having [Washington] decide things from the top down.”
Santorum was right to take up the gantlet on this issue last night (and earlier), and Newt Gingrich is incredibly wrongheaded to run away from it. Meanwhile, with some smart use of language, as per Jim Guirard, MediChoice might be a real political winner.
Wow. With the news that Newt Gingrich’s entire senior campaign staff resigned en masse this morning, some are speculating that the fallout – and newly freed staff – will benefit the rumored Rick Perry for President campaign.
Prognostications about the future aside, Gingrich’s present is spectacularly unclear. Where does he go from here? So far, the most memorable moments from Newt’s 2012 odyssey are calling a sensible Medicare reform “right wing social engineering,” an epic press release, a half-a-million-dollar credit line at Tiffany’s, and now this. Amazing.
One thing’s for sure: Newt needs to find some way to bounce back, if only for his personal future as a pundit, speaker, and idea factory. If this mass resignation is the final entry of his presidential campaign, it will be awhile before anyone wants to pony up big bucks to get advice from a guy who couldn’t manage a single week of sustained success.
Monday’s news cycle has been very good to two men who don’t receive a lot of sunshine in their lives these days.
The first is former International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was in a New York City courtroom this morning to plead not guilty to the charge that he sexually assaulted a Big Apple hotel maid. While his circumstances are still unenviable, the media spotlight abandoned the French financier in favor of the equally prurient Anthony Weiner, the Democratic New York congressman who admitted at a press conference earlier today to committing every gross act you already suspected he committed. The irony must be galling to Weiner, who, had he followed Strauss-Kahn’s lead and pursued a career in French politics, would doubtless be up for a cabinet position after his recent revelations.
The second is Michael Steele, the former RNC chairman whose two-year tenure was marked by a parade of rhetorical gaffes and accusations of gross mismanagement. Steele, however, looks like a man with the message discipline of a Soviet apparatchik in comparison to the new DNC chairwoman, Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
As our own Quin Hillyer has repeatedly (and persuasively) argued, Wasserman Schultz is a public official who elevates inanity to an art form. Prior to today, her most egregious exercise in vapidity had been her characterization of Paul Ryan’s plan to reform Medicare:
[Republicans] would take the people who are younger than 55 years old today and tell them, ‘You know what? You’re on your own. Go and find private health insurance in the health care insurance market. We’re going to throw you to the wolves, and allow insurance companies to deny you coverage and drop you for pre-existing conditions. ‘We’re going to give you X amount of dollars and you figure it out.’
Asinine and, as is now well-documented, totally wrong. But if Wasserman Schultz seemed to have found a floor for exhibitionist stupidity with that remark, she has now gone subterranean. Asked this weekend about the possibility of stricter state voting laws, this was the controlled implosion that ensued:
“Now you have the Republicans, who want to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws and literally — and very transparently — block access to the polls to voters who are more likely to vote for Democratic candidates than Republican candidates,” she told host Roland Martin on “Washington Watch” this weekend [emphasis hers]. “And it’s nothing short of that blatant.”
Some remarks speak for themselves. But just a few notes for the gentlewoman (I suppose) from Florida:
Columnist Michael Barone thinks that House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) may be reconsidering his decision not to run for president in 2012. How else to explain Ryan’s recent pro-American Exceptionalism foreign policy speech? Paraphrasing Barone, how often do committee chairmen weigh in on issues outside of their jurisdiction?
Here’s an excerpt from the concluding section of Ryan’s speech:
A more prosperous economy enables us to afford a modernized military that is properly sized for the breadth of the challenges we face. Such a military must also be an efficient and responsible steward of taxpayer dollars in order to maintain the confidence of the American people. The House-passed budget recognizes this, which is why it includes the $78 billion in defense efficiency savings identified by Secretary Gates.
By contrast, President Obama has announced $400 billion in new defense cuts, saying in effect he’ll figure out what those cuts mean for America’s security later. Indiscriminate cuts that are budget-driven and not strategy-driven are dangerous to America and America’s interests in the world. Secretary Gates put it well: “that’s math, not strategy.”
I’ll close on a final thought: Britain’s premature decline was triggered by a crisis of confidence among its political leadership. Once they concluded that they should manage Britain’s decline, it mattered little what Britain was objectively capable of achieving on the world stage. This crisis of self-perception was fatal to Britain’s global leadership.
Today, some in this country relish the idea of America’s retreat from our role in the world. They say that it’s about time for other nations to take over; that we should turn inward; that we should reduce ourselves to membership on a long list of mediocre has-beens.
This view applies moral relativism on a global scale. Western civilization and its founding moral principles might be good for the West, but who are we to suggest that other systems are any worse? – or so the thinking goes.
Instead of heeding these calls to surrender, we must renew our commitment to the idea that America is the greatest force for human freedom the world has ever seen; a country whose devotion to free enterprise has lifted more people out of poverty than any economic system ever designed; and a nation whose best days still lie ahead of us, if we make the necessary choices today.
Thank you.
Thank you, Sir. Now, how about running for president to see those choices made?
If you like Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater you’ll love Jon Huntsman’s opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal. Sounding themes of economic growth, fiscal responsibility, and balanced budgets as the key to a prosperous future Huntsman even borrows the Gipper’s famous “time for choosing” phrase to headline his column. Heck, the former Republican governor of Utah and ambassador to China even praises Rep. Paul Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” budget resolution.
One problem: Jon Huntsman isn’t the reincarnation of Ronald Reagan. Rather, he’s a slicker, more polished version of John McCain. In a word, he’s a maverick whose method of policymaking is open to whatever the political consensus of the moment requires. As I wrote for CFIF this week, Huntsman is attracting the same kind of “progressive” Republicans that flocked to McCain’s failed presidential bids.
For all his red meat economic rhetoric in today’s column, Huntsman can’t hide from his past support for President Barack Obama’s stimulus spending, growth in (state) government, cap-and-trade, and state-run health care.
Back in 2005 as governor, Huntsman gave a summary of his approach to illegal immigration that can be used as a window into how he governs in general: “I want to be a catalyst and report good ideas that will lead to a philosophy. That’s what we need first and foremost.”
Wrong. In the Age of Obama, conservatives aren’t looking for a presidential candidate that formulates his governing philosophy on the fly. Think about this: If this is the way Huntsman thinks of his job as an executive, is it too much of a leap to assume that this is the kind of ad hoc philosophizing he’ll look for in judicial nominations? Haven’t we had enough of judicial activists making up the law as they go along, rewriting the Constitution so that it fits whatever facts are in play?
Yet that is exactly what Huntsman’s “report good ideas that will lead to a philosophy” statement suggests. We’ve seen the kind of cognitive dissonance that Republicans like John McCain truck in when their policy positions are not tethered to conservative principles. Huntsman is right in his economic prescriptions, but what conservative isn’t these days? The real question is whether he’ll be right dealing with future problems that require him to use his first principles, whatever those are.
Yesterday, Ezra Klein of the Washington Post listed five hardball questions he’d like to hear answered by President Barack Obama:
1. You have repeatedly lauded the economy of the Clinton years, yet in a time of high and mounting deficits, you want to make most of the Bush tax cuts permanent. Economically speaking, what makes you believe the Clinton-era tax rates are too high?
2. During the 2008 campaign, you pledged never to raise taxes on any families making less than $250,000 a year. The excise tax on high-value health insurance plans, which you supported as part of health-care reform, did raise taxes on families making less than $250,000 a year. If you’re going to raise almost a trillion dollars by cutting and capping expenditures, as your budget proposes, that will also affect families making less than $250,000. When will you admit that fiscal responsibility requires tax increases on families who aren’t rich?
3. Your budget empowers the Independent Payment Advisory Board to push Medicare toward value-based purchasing designs. But it doesn’t empower the board to experiment with benefit design more broadly, or any form of cost sharing. The committee’s powers remain mostly restricted to payment reforms. Why?
4. The main differences between your budget and the Simpson-Bowles report is that your budget raises less in taxes and cuts less in defense spending. Why were those decisions made?
5. You’ve talked frequently about the need to “win the future” through new investments and initiatives. But unlike the budgets proposed by the House Progressives or Andy Stern or EPI, Demos and the Century Foundation, there’s nothing in your budget that specifically commits to any such investments, nor any particular funding source dedicated to them. If these investments are so important, why not build them into your budget? Why accept the framework that this discussion should be entirely about cuts?
The day before, Klein listed eight thoughtful questions to House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan about the latter’s health care reform.
Responses to each set of queries would be greatly beneficial to Americans trying to sort out whether each man’s plan passes the logic and laugh tests. After hosting several town hall meetings about his budget reforms, Ryan seems eager to go point-by-point. The president and his entourage; not so much.
In a newly released video, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan discusses why Congress must reform Medicare in order to save it and the dangers of doing nothing.
In a statement that accompanied the video, Rep. Ryan said:
We can no longer let politicians in Washington deny the danger to Medicare – the danger is all too real, and the health of our nation’s seniors is far too important. We have to save Medicare to avoid disruptions in benefits for current seniors, and to strengthen the program for future generations. House Republicans have put forward a plan to do just that. Democratic leaders in Congress have failed to produce a plan – it has been 755 days since Senate Democrats even passed a budget. Meanwhile, the President’s plan would empower a panel of 15 unelected bureaucrats to cut Medicare for current seniors, while failing to save the program for future retirees.
“This video lays out the clear choice our nation faces on Medicare: Will Medicare become a program in which a board of bureaucrats manages its bankruptcy by denying care to seniors? Or will leaders work together to save and strengthen Medicare by empowering seniors to choose health care plans that work best for them, with less support for the wealthy and more help for the poor and the sick? House Republicans have advanced solutions to save Medicare. Instead of working with us, the leaders of the Democratic Party have opted to play politics with the health security of America’s seniors.”
During the 1980 presidential campaign, Republican candidate George H. W. Bush decried Ronald Reagan’s supply-side tax cuts as “voodoo economics” because the policy promised to lower tax rates and generate more production, and thus more tax revenues. Bush’s denunciation of Reagan’s economic vision was a proxy for Keynesian thinkers in both parties, who thought (and think) that tax reductions spur consumption (demand), not production (supply).
Of course, Bush lost to Reagan in the Republican primary that year, in part because Reagan had a more compelling message: let’s cut taxes to get the economy growing instead of cutting them simply to reduce spending. Moreover, Bush was wrong because Reagan’s policies worked.
This weekend, 2012 presidential candidate Newt Gingrich slammed Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and the latter’s “Path to Prosperity” budget proposal as “right-wing social engineering.” Why? Because Gingrich thinks changing the way Medicare operates – from straight government subsidy to vouchers – is too “radical.”
But that isn’t stopping Gingrich from continuing to support an individual mandate to buy health insurance. (Like fellow contender Mitt Romney (R-MA), but unlike President Barack Obama, Gingrich wants the individual mandate at the state, not federal, level.) So, in Gingrich’s mind, transforming Medicare from a defined benefit into a defined voucher is “radical,” but mandating individuals to buy health insurance is not?
When Reagan adopted the mantra of economic growth through across-the-board tax cuts in 1980, he gave voters a clear alternative to the shared scarcity narrative being peddled by politicians in both parties. Ryan’s budget proposal is based on Reagan’s insight that less taxes and more growth sells; less choice and more government mandates do not.
Like Reagan, whoever wins the Republican presidential nomination next year will have to make some accommodation with Ryan’s economic vision. Downsizing – whether it’s freedom, opportunity, taxes, or spending – isn’t enough of a message to create the kind of majority needed to enact the kind of policy changes that spur real private sector growth. With positions supporting ethanol subsidies and state level individual mandates, it sounds like Newt Gingrich is more comfortable playing the elder Bush’s role in this campaign.
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) owes a lot to the late Jack Kemp, Ryan’s former boss at Empower America. In a published remembrance of Kemp, Ryan said that while Ronald Reagan motivated him to get into politics, Kemp inspired him.
Indeed, Ryan’s “Roadmap to America’s Future” and “Path to Prosperity” budget resolution are models of Kemp’s supply-side thinking about incentivizing economic growth through government policies. It was thought that, at most, Ryan might entertain becoming the 2012 GOP presidential nominee’s running mate if the right candidate asked. Much like Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), Ryan is a methodical politician of substance who is purposefully navigating his career trajectory. Unlike others, Ryan and Rubio seemed committed to establishing a real record before running for higher offices.
But reality may be pushing up Ryan’s time frame. With the surprise announcement that Senator Herb Kohl (D-WI) will not seek reelection next year, Ryan has an opportunity not unlike Jack Kemp faced as a rising New York congressman in the late 1970’s. Then, Kemp decided not to challenge liberal Republican incumbent Jacob Javits in the 1980 GOP primary. Had he done so and won, Kemp would have significantly increased his national profile by holding a statewide office at the beginning of the Reagan era.
Of course, to run Kemp would have had to split time between promoting his Senate candidacy and his landmark Kemp-Roth tax cuts – the soon-to-be centerpiece of Reagan’s economic recovery plan. Like Kemp, Ryan has a game-changing economic program to fight for this next cycle, but unlike his former mentor, I think the odds are very good that Ryan will decide to run for the Senate. If Democrats are going to make Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” a major campaign theme next year, why not see if Wisconsin voters are ready to promote their state’s best presidential contender to statewide status?
Rasmussen Reports says that 40% of Americans are still undecided on whether to support the “Path to Prosperity” budget plan by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). CFIF strongly endorses the House Budget Committee Chairman’s attempt to rein in federal spending, while giving Medicare beneficiaries more choices in their health care decisions.
According to the poll, 26% of likely voters support Ryan’s plan, while 34% oppose it. That leaves 40% who still don’t know enough about Ryan’s proposal to have an opinion.
The liberal media is already waging a misinformation campaign against Ryan and other sensible fiscal conservatives. For a primer on the “Path to Prosperity” go here.
In order to change the culture in Washington, voters need to change the terms of the debate. Educating yourself and others on Ryan’s plan gives fiscal conservatives the ammunition they need to win the hearts and minds of the 40% still undecided.
Who decides? That is the most important question when it comes to Medicare savings. First, some background:
Conservatives suddenly are abuzz again with talk of an Obamacare “death panel,” and in substance they have a point: If the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) works anything like its model in Oregon… and if government health-care programs effectively crowd out private options so that the bureaucratic decision-makers in the government program are, for all intents and purposes, the ultimate arbiters of who receives which treatments… then people have serious reason to worry that their lives could be foreshortened by government fiat. Employing the phrase “death panel” has its advantages and disadvantages (the biggest of the latter is that it keeps the establishment media from giving the complaint any credence, even though the problems with IPAB are both real and acute), but the board’s potential for harm is evident in the fact that 72 Democratic House members last year joined Republicans in asking for the panel to be removed from the bill.
Meanwhile, the anti-Obamacare lawsuit which takes on IPAB directly (among other things), led by the Goldwater Institue, seems to me absolutely on target in challenging how the board is set up to be a power unto itself with no congressional oversight of any relevance or weight. That suit merits far more attention, via full columns rather than quick blog mentions, and conservatives are foolish not to rally in support of it.
With all the anti-IPAB talk bubbling up right now, though, the talk has been strangely disconnected from the budget debate that has been front and center of the American political universe for weeks. Yet with President “Don’t Interrupt Me” Obama jetting all over the country to spread demagogic scare tactics against the Medicare portion of Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget proposal, those on the right really haven’t done much to parry the specifics of his attacks on the “voucherization” or “privatization” of Medicare. Yet the fact is that the president aims to save almost as much money from Medicare as Ryan does — except that he wants to use IPAB to do it.
That’s why conservatives should take up his challenge. We should answer that it is he, not we, who is (/are) for “cutting” Medicare. He does it by giving vast powers to unelected bureaucrats almost entirely unanswerable to Congress. We achieve savings, which may not involve actual cuts in care at all, by giving power to the patients themselves. Conservatives should do a very specific poll on Medicare Part D. If, as I suspect, it is still a highly successful program, then conservatives should say that all Ryan wants to do is to make all of Medicare work the same way that Part D does — except without the doughnut hole. The idea is to allow seniors themselves to achieve savings while finding the best care they can.
We save; Obama cuts. More importantly, we give the power to the patients; he gives it to bureaucrats with a mandate to chop costs by unaccountable orders.
So the question is, Who decides: The individual patient, or the government commissars?
When phrased like that, conservatives don’t even need to say the phrase “death panel.” For most listeners, the scary implications of Obama’s approach will be clear.
Faced with the decline and eventual insolvency of America’s welfare state, congressional Republicans led by Paul Ryan laid out a 73- page plan to reform entitlements for a new generation and right America’s economic course. Democrats, on the other hand, cut this ad, a new low in demagoguery:
I don’t ever want to hear another Democrat refer to the GOP as “The Party of No”.
The Washington Post has a helpful – and short – explanation of the debt ceiling debate, along with some interesting facts. *My comments in ( )
Read the entire synopsis here.
The Economist explains how “The Party of No” is most unified around the theme of being anti-Keynesianism. Keynesianism teaches that government can grow the economy by spending tax dollars to stimulate consumption (i.e. demand).
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and other Republicans supporting his “Path to Prosperity” budget argue that cutting taxes gives individuals more money to save and invest in production (i.e. supply), the increase of which creates more jobs.
Not all GOP-ers are sold on Ryan’s revived supply-side theory. Instead, they prefer to focus on spending cuts as a matter of principle. Come election season, it isn’t likely that voters will support merely cuts. They’ll want a vision of what the extra money in their pockets can do.
If recent history is any guide, I suspect Paul Ryan will emerge as the main spokesman for the positive vision of limited government.
Now that President Barack Obama has formally responded to House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s Path to Prosperity, the New York Times offers a helpful (if very brief) side-by-side comparison of the two.
In a nutshell, the differences can be seen in the two sides’ cuts to domestic discretionary spending. Ryan’s plan cuts $1.6 trillion over ten years. Obama would cut $600 billion.
Don’t say next year’s elections won’t offer a choice of visions…
UPDATE: For a more detailed side-by-side comparison, care of the House Budget Committee, click here.
The Wall Street Journal reports that President Barack Obama’s upcoming speech about how to balance the budget will include tax increases along with cuts to programs like Medicare and Medicaid.
The call for higher taxes on America’s job creators will solidify the decision facing voters next year. The Democrats want more money, while the Republicans want less government.
If there is a positive aspect about the president showing his true tax-and-spend colors, it’s that ideology – how serious people frame reality and their decisions about it – is now front and center in politics.
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and the GOP want lower taxes and private sector growth. President Obama and the Democrats want to spend taxpayer money into an ever-growing share of GDP.
Let the debate begin.
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