Freedom Line Blog

Larry Kudlow has the best summary thus far on the importance of Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) pro-growth budget proposal:

The key point is not the actual numbers, but the direction of the numbers. Spending is coming down.

Trend lines are important in politics and in finances.  With Ryan’s budget plan, Tea Partiers may have found the details guy they need to make their rhetoric into reality.

His crypto-candidacy is only a few weeks old, but, as Politico reports, Donald Trump is already making big waves in the race to the be the next Republican presidential nominee:

Donald Trump is a force to be reckoned with on the national political stage, according to a new poll on Wednesday night.

The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows Trump tied for second place with Mike Huckabee, both at 17 percent, and leading the GOP pack among Tea Party supporters.

Those are huge numbers for someone who was completely absent from presidential chatter just a few months ago (of course, universal name recognition doesn’t hurt).

Let’s stipulate that the odds favor Trump’s flirtations being nothing more than some extremely sophisticated guerilla marketing. That being said, one has to wonder where the source of his appeal lies. The safest bet? Trump is popular because he is unafraid to speak his mind, directly and unapologetically. That’s a rare trait in an age where most politicians are driven by fear of losing the next election rather than hope for governing before then. To the extent that it’s present in other GOP comers — whether in the iron will of Chris Christie or the intellectual honesty of Paul Ryan — it seems to be a gene characteristic of those who won’t be running for president in 2012.

GOP White House hopefuls should take note. There’s a Trump-shaped vacuum in this presidential field.

In the must-watch video below, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan lays out his 2012 budget proposal and the consequences should Congress fail to act now to restore the nation’s  fiscal sanity.

Today,  Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan and the House Republican majority are introducing their much-anticipated 2012 budget plan.  The bold proposal — “The Path to Prosperity” — is refreshingly comprehensive in addressing the nation’s debt crisis and promoting economic prosperity.  According to Congressman Ryan:

For starters, it cuts $6.2 trillion in spending from the president’s budget over the next 10 years, reduces the debt as a percentage of the economy, and puts the nation on a path to actually pay off our national debt. Our proposal brings federal spending to below 20% of gross domestic product (GDP), consistent with the postwar average, and reduces deficits by $4.4 trillion.

A study just released by the Heritage Center for Data Analysis projects that The Path to Prosperity will help create nearly one million new private-sector jobs next year, bring the unemployment rate down to 4% by 2015, and result in 2.5 million additional private-sector jobs in the last year of the decade. It spurs economic growth, with $1.5 trillion in additional real GDP over the decade. According to Heritage’s analysis, it would result in $1.1 trillion in higher wages and an average of $1,000 in additional family income each year.

Furthermore, Ryan’s budget cuts taxes and strengthens to the social safety net with commonsense reforms to Medicare and Medicaid and by advancing the discussion to sure up Social Security for future generations.

Simply put, the proposal is a real and comprehensive solution to a grave spending and debt crisis that threatens America’s future.  Failure to act to right the nation’s fiscal ship, and now, is no longer an option.  The Path to Prosperity budget deserves serious consideration, not the partisan politics as usual that has already begun.

Read more details on Ryan’s budget plan here.  For the complete plan, click here (.pdf).

This week provides a stark contrast between a leader actually willing to risk political capital, versus a man who now seeks four more years of politics-as-usual.

On the one hand, we have House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R – Wisconsin).  Tomorrow, Congressman Ryan will unveil a federal budget proposal that reduces spending by $4 trillion over the coming ten years, provides pro-growth tax reform and caps runaway federal spending.  All without reducing Social Security benefits by a single penny for anyone already receiving them or over 55 years of age, along with Medicare reform that will save it from its catastrophic fate if nothing is done.  Congressman Ryan knows full well that by offering budget leadership, Democrats will possess a “political weapon” to use against him, even if it means that “they will have to lie and demagogue” to do so.  But instead of shrinking, he has chosen leadership.

On the other hand, we have the President of the United States.  The purported leader of the Free World.  The most powerful man on Earth.  The man who formed a blue-ribbon deficit commission, then proceeded to ignore it.  Instead of making sure that a Congress dominated by his own party could even manage to pass a 2011 budget, instead of offering decisive world statesmanship amid worldwide crises and instead of providing leadership in averting a national debt catastrophe, Obama instead focused on unveiling his 2012 reelection campaign this week.  Instead of offering a plan, the AWOL Obama will apparently just sit back and attack Paul Ryan’s.

So there you have it.  One man seeks to cut spending by $4 trillion, and the other man seeks to spend $1 billion getting himself reelected.

In a November commentary, I warned that Ben Bernanke’s expansionary monetary policy threatened to erode the value of the dollar and weaken the American economy. Now the leading mind of the House GOP caucus is saying the same thing to the Fed Chairman’s face. With Bernanke appearing before the House Budget Committee earlier today, newly minted Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin laid the consequences of “quantitative easing” on the line:

“There is nothing more insidious that a country can do to its citizens than debase its currency,” Ryan told Bernanke. “Chairman Bernanke: We know you know this. We know that you’re focused and concerned about this. The Fed’s exit strategy and future policy – it will determine how this ends.”

Ryan said he believed a “course correction here in Washington is sorely needed.”

“Endless borrowing is not a strategy,” he said. “My concern is that the costs of the Fed’s current monetary policy – the money creation and massive balance sheet expansion – will come to outweigh the perceived short-term benefits.”

“It is hard to overstate the consequences of getting this wrong. The dollar is the world’s reserve currency and this has given us tremendous benefits in the global economy,” Ryan said.

As usual, Paul Ryan is right. Unfortunately, there’s little that can be done from the outside. The Fed operates free of traditional rules of transparency (one of the reasons the push to audit its books has gained so much traction) and it works on the basis of a delusional proposition that it can be an engine of economic stimulus at the same time that it maintains the dollar as a stable store of value (a proposition that Ryan has rightly called into question). There’s still a lot of work to be done to rationalize American monetary policy. But it’s at least heartening to know that we’ve literally got our best man on it.

Other than her congressional district, Rep. Michele Bachmann’s (R-MN) true base of support comes from the millions of Tea Party members currently providing the grassroots dynamism of the Republican Party.  Bachmann raised so much money last cycle that some pundits think she’s running for U.S. Senate or even president.

The announcement that Bachmann is delivering an unofficial Republican response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address will heighten that speculation.  It will also anger the House Republican leadership that continues to pass over Bachmann.  First, it voted her down in a bid to be the new chair of the House GOP Conference Chair.  Bachmann pressed ahead with her own Tea Party caucus, raising even more money.  Now, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is slated to give the official Republican response, but Bachmann will deliver her own via the Tea Party Express website.

There may not be a way for Bachmann to capitalize on her media stardom, unless she continues to go her own way.  This will widen the gap between her and House GOP leadership, but if she wins a Senate seat or the presidency in 2012, the onus will be on leadership to make nice with her.

For those CFIF readers looking for intellectually stimulating Christmastime reading, I heartily recommend Walter Russell Mead’s extended blog post titled “The Crisis of the American Intellectual.”  Picking up and expanding on Alan Bloom’s thesis in “Closing of the American Mind,” Mead issues a frontal attack on our nation’s intellectual elites, a group Mead faults as failing to adapt to a changing world.  Himself a Democrat, Mead argues that intellectuals – the best credentialed, most influentially placed people in our society – across the political spectrum owe it to the people and causes they champion to get serious about constructing a workable, sustainable government.  Here is a too brief sample:

Right now, too many intellectuals try to turn this into a left/right debate rather than one about the past and the future.  There is a liberal case for the radical overhaul of our knowledge industries as well as a Tea Party one.  People who want to extend government protections to more groups need to be thinking how government can be radically restructured so it can be more effective at a lower cost.  People who want more education to be available for the poor need to think about deep reform in primary and secondary education, and they need to think up ways to reduce the spiraling costs of university education.  Those who like the public services provided in troubled blue states like New York, Illinois and California need to redesign state government and find alternatives to the tenured civil service bureaucracies built one hundred years ago.  Those who want more access and more equal access to education, to legal services and to medical care need to think about how we can use technology to radically restructure the way we organize and deliver these services — and the more you care about the poor the less you can care about the protests of the guilds.

Governor Chris Christie (R-NJ) is challenging the public education guild (i.e. teachers unions).  Governor Mitch Daniels (R-IN) challenged the bureaucratic leviathan and won key reforms.  Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is challenging the unsustainable structure of the Great Society.  Ryan once worked for Jack Kemp as a speech writer during the latter’s stint as Bob Dole’s vice presidential running mate.  Kemp challenged liberal statists and libertarian anarchists with his vision of an “Opportunity Society,” an approach to government policy that injected economic opportunity down into the roots of the welfare state.

The debate about government spending will dominate our politics for the foreseeable future.  Hopefully, policy entrepreneurs like Christie, Daniels, and Ryan will gain the attention – and the success – their ideas deserve.

Who knew that a week beginning with liberal howling about President Barack Obama’s “tax deal” with congressional Republicans would end with bitter disagreements between conservative stalwarts about whether the deal is actually good?  Charles Krauthammer thinks it’s the biggest Keynesian stimulus in American history.  Jonah Goldberg disagrees.  So does Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), arguing that pro-growth tax policy is the key first step towards jumpstarting the economy (spending cuts are next).

For his part, President Obama prefers to outsource his public communications duties to predecessor Bill Clinton.  After Clinton started taking questions at a joint press conference, Obama excused himself to attend the White House Christmas party; as if the sight of him leaving Clinton to speak on behalf of the administration didn’t matter.  Either Obama doesn’t care that he looked like the impatient junior partner to Clinton’s elder, me-first statesman, or he failed to appreciate the optics of his televised abdication.

Hopefully, we can chalk up all this confusion to it being a Friday at the end of a long congressional session.  Otherwise…

Amid solid recommendations to put Medicare and Medicaid on a sustainable financial path, Obama Debt Commission member and Roadmap author Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) staked out very defensible ground for today’s conservative leaders to Roll Call’s Mort Kondrake:

And the incoming chairman of the House Budget Committee described himself as having been mentored by the late Rep. Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.), believing in “a prosperous opportunity society built atop a solid safety net.”

“I am not a laissez-faire, Hobbsian libertarian,” he told me. “I believe in a circumscribed safety net, one that helps people get back on their feet and is there for people who can’t help themselves. But I believe in a pro-growth, limited-government, free-enterprise society that encourages people to make the most of their lives.”

Anyone else for a one-on-one debate between President Barack Obama and Rep. Ryan on healthcare reform next January?

Yuval Levin notices an interesting trend in the various plans coming out of the Obama Debt Commission.  When the proposals are added together there seems to be a consensus building towards overhauling federal healthcare entitlement spending.  If done correctly, it could be a moment for conservatives to inject market principles like choice and opportunity into the system.

There is growing agreement in American politics that the challenge of our time is cleaning up the horrible mess created by the Great Society—the mess that is our approach to domestic discretionary spending but above all the mess that is our health-care entitlement system. That is the essence of our debt and deficit problems.

The question is whether we can deal with that mess by keeping the basic structure of the Great Society entitlements while trimming significantly elsewhere and massively raising taxes, or whether we must deal with it by fundamentally reforming those Great Society entitlements while trimming significantly elsewhere and spreading the tax burden more widely but less heavily to encourage growth and innovation. The latter is fairly obviously the answer to that question—given demographic and economic realities, and given the kind of country the American public wants to live in—but it will take a little time before that really sinks in. It is a very good thing, though, that the question is now being asked.

Reforming (or rather, transforming) the Great Society into a fiscally sustainable, free market-guided, consumer-driven system would be the kind of bipartisan project worthy of the era President Barack Obama and his congressional counterparts find themselves.  Solving that puzzle would establish the president’s sought for legacy while enacting the kind of policy changes the Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and other conservative intellectuals champion.

H/T: National Review Online

If getting a House chairmanship were as automatic as moving from ranking member of the minority to chairman of the majority, then Representatives Ron Paul (R-TX) and Paul Ryan (R-WI) would be resting easy today.  Rep. Paul is the ranking Republican on the subcommittee with oversight responsibility of the Federal Reserve, a role the Austrian economist would relish.  For his part, Rep. Ryan is the ranking Republican on the powerful Budget Committee, the body empowered to make significant changes in public policy through the budget writing process.

Both men have reason to doubt an unchallenged assent to power because both are on record with radical plans to shrink the size of government.  Paul is sure to refile legislation to audit the Fed, a proposition that may gain popularity with the Fed’s announcement to add nearly $1 trillion to the national debt.  For his part, Ryan’s Roadmap to America’s Future is a comprehensive vehicle for delivering sustainable government programs that leave room for entrepreneurship and growth.

Voters had their say on Tuesday.  Now, it’s time to see how many fiscal conservatives in the newly enlarged GOP caucus are willing to elevate two of the most ardent foes of big government to consequential leadership positions.

Conservatives can be forgiven for thinking that every member of the liberal establishment has read and memorized Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.  The subject of Hillary Clinton’s college senior thesis and the inspiration for a young Barack Obama’s zeal for community organizing, the Rules stand alongside Chairman Mao’s little red book in the Leftist’s canon.  But time and again, the liberals running the Democratic Party into the ground seem to be as clueless about the rules as they are about the laws of economic gravity.

Consider Rule #12: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.  On some level, liberals knew this when they spent the better part of a year castigating Republicans as ‘The Party of No’.  They knew that the public wouldn’t accept the GOP as a credible governing party until it produced a constructive alternative.  (Though worthy of support, Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) Roadmap for America’s Future has yet to gain widespread acceptance in the GOP caucus.)  With this week’s ‘Pledge to America’ the GOP is now a party with a constructive alternative.

The field is open, liberals.  And time is dwindling.

Here’s Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) take on President Barack Obama’s Clintonian ability to triangulate:

Looking ahead, Ryan says “a lot of people speculate on whether [President Obama] will triangulate like [Bill] Clinton did” after the GOP sweep in 1994. The Wisconsin Republican isn’t holding his breath. “I don’t know whether that’s really who [Obama] is,” Ryan says. “First, the economy is not going to be like it was in 1995 or 1996. Second, the president is a liberal and Clinton was arguably a centrist. And third, I just don’t think that [Obama] is willing to admit that all the things he did during the first two years of his presidency were wrong, because I don’t think he believes that. I don’t see a big triangulation happening.”

As summer traipses towards fall, the president’s persistence in his agenda is making it more and more likely that he will force his 2012 reelection campaign to be a referendum on him and his ideas.  Hopefully, Republicans will nominate someone who can not only define those deficiencies, but also articulate a better way forward.

H/T: The Corner at National Review Online

As usual, Jay Cost has an eyebrow raising piece of analysis – today discussing in Technicolor detail how President Barack Obama’s narrow geographic popularity foretold of a need to govern from the center of the country; not the center of his party.

What he should have done instead was disarm his opponents. If he had built initial policy proposals from the middle, he could have wooed the moderate flank of the Republican party, marginalized the conservatives, and alleviated the concerns of those gettable voters in the South and the Midwest. This is precisely what Bill Clinton did between 1995 and 2000, and it is what the President’s promises of “post-partisanship” suggested.

Our system of government can only produce policy when geographically broad coalitions favor it. The Senate, more than any other institution, forces such breadth. Obama created breadth the wrong way. He watered down initially liberal legislation to prompt just enough moderate Democrats to sign on. Instead, he should have built policy from the center, then worked to pick up enough votes on either side. The left would have been disappointed, but the right would have been marginalized and, most importantly, Independent voters – who have abandoned the President in droves – might still be on board.

One of the great ironies of liberal politicians is that they so often discount the yen of conservative intellectuals to participate in policy making.  People like Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) are driven by ideas, and enjoy the process of fashioning policies that get as many of them enacted as possible.

But they are not necessarily “my-way-or-the-highway” types.  Ryan’s Roadmap for America’s Future is a multi-decade plan for balancing the budget.  Implicit in its longevity is Ryan’s willingness to work out compromises that preserve Social Security and Medicare while making them fiscally sound.  For his part, Gingrich has always been the kind of politician willing to hammer out solutions with the other side, as he attempted to do with Bill Clinton.

People wonder why we don’t have bipartisan breakthroughs anymore.  In part, it’s because politicians like Barack Obama don’t have the political sense to “spread the success around” turning their adversaries into cooperators.

In the video below Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is out stumping for his Roadmap for America’s Future, a comprehensive reform plan that actually focuses on reforming existing government policies and programs; not creating new ones.  Early on he addresses the observation that politicians who put out detailed plans get criticized, and sometimes lose their jobs.  Ryan would rather take the chance that commonsense people are ready to have a real discussion about getting America’s fiscal house in order.

May the 2010 midterm elections bring more people like Paul Ryan to Congress.

Answer: quite possibly, the margin of victory for Republicans in the United States Senate.

According to a new report from Public Policy Polling today, the largely unknown Johnson (a plastics manufacturer from Oshkosh) is within two points of the Badger State’s liberal stalwart, Senator Russ Feingold.  If the Wisconsin seat flips, it puts Republicans very close to retaking the Senate. Here’s the succint explanation.

Republicans currently have 41 seats in the Senate. Since the tie-breaking vote in the Senate belongs to the Democratic Vice President, Republicans would need a net pickup of 10 seats to retake the majority — an extremely high threshold.

To start with, that means having no Republican incumbents get beat. That shouldn’t be too hard. There aren’t many GOP incumbents around these days, and the ones that are are fairly safe. Only North Carolina’s Richard Burr looks vulnerable this year and he’ll probably be able to ride it out.

The next step is hanging on to the seven open GOP seats: one due to a Republican primary in Utah, the other six owing to retirements in Kansas, Ohio, Kentucky, Missouri, Florida, and New Hampshire. Utah, Kansas, and New Hampshire look very safe right now. Kentucky will be close and will likely hinge on how cautious Rand Paul can learn to be. Florida has scrambled into a three-way race with Charlie Crist’s decision to run as an independent, but look for Marco Rubio to make a strong showing as the year continues. Ohio and Missouri will likely stay tight up through election day.

Assuming a perfect defense, then, Republicans will still need to pickup 10 seats on offense. There are a few pieces of low-lying fruit: North Dakota Governor John Hoeven will almost certaintly win the seat being vacated by Byron Dorgan. The odds also look quite favorable for Dan Coats in Indiana and Mike Castle in Delaware to pick up open seats, and for John Boozman in Arkansas to defeat incumbent Blanche Lincoln.

Factor in those wins and Republicans still need six seats for a majority. And with the Wisconsin race competitive, they now have seven prospects. In addition to Johnson’s challenge to Feingold, there are also serious threats to Democratic incumbents in California, Nevada, Colorado, and Washington. With Republicans competitive for open seats in Illinois and Pennsylvania, the Wisconsin race actually gives the GOP an ever-so-slight margin of error for taking back a majority come election day.

And who is this great white hope of the upper midwest? George Will’s profile in the Washington Post last month provides some insight. If he’s right, this may be one more member of an exceptional senate class in 2010. To wit:

The theme of his campaign, the genesis of which was an invitation to address a Tea Party rally, is: “First of all, freedom.” Then? “Then you’ve got to put meat on the bones.” He gets much of his meat from the Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages. And from a Wisconsin congressman, Paul Ryan, whose “road map” for entitlement reform Johnson praises. Health care? “Mitch Daniels has the solution.” Indiana’s Republican governor has offered state employees the choice of consumer-controlled health savings accounts, and 70 percent now choose them.

“The most basic right,” Johnson says, “is the right to keep your property.” Remembering the golden age when, thanks to Ronald Reagan, the top income tax rate was 28 percent, Johnson says: “For a brief moment we were 72 percent free.” Johnson’s daughter — now a nurse in neonatal intensive care — was born with a serious heart defect. The operations “when her heart was only the size of a small plum” made him passionate about protecting the incentives that bring forth excellent physicians.

This sounds like a conservative who nows how to connect first principles to daily governance. Dare we dream such a thing?

In the newest round of praise for Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and his “Roadmap for America’s Future,” The American Spectator draws attention to the Democrats’ well organized attack of the plan and Republicans’ tepid endorsement.

In the wake of the uproar, Republican leaders tried to distance themselves from the proposal, emphasizing that while it contained good ideas, Ryan’s plan wasn’t the official Republican budget. In an election year during which the GOP is poised to make big gains, Republicans don’t want to give Democrats an easy opportunity to paint them as the party keen on destroying Social Security and Medicare. But if Republicans are to regain any credibility as a party that wants actually to limit government (as opposed to just talk about it when in the minority), then they can’t shy away from this debate. The looming fiscal crisis is too severe, it’s approaching too soon, and it’s far too big of a threat to the American way of life.

Thanks to the angst of a fretful nation, Republicans will probably regain control of the House and perhaps the Senate this November.  What they need, however, is a governing mandate.  The only way they can claim one is to have a clearly defined set of principles and goals that they can run on and win with this cycle.  The 1994 “Contract with America” worked.  So could Ryan’s Roadmap.  Getting specific on the best way forward to secure America’s future is a fight worth having.

Let me start by saying I don’t have anything against the Leader of the House Republicans, Rep. John Boehner (R-OH).  It’s just that I don’t have much of anything for him, either.  That’s not the case with Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), who’s constant stream of ideas and commentary should make House Republicans seriously consider elevating him to the Speakership if the GOP, as expected, wins a majority of seats in the midterm elections this November.

Check out this excerpt from Ryan’s column today:

We are challenged to answer again the momentous questions our Founders raised when they launched mankind’s noblest experiment in human freedom. They made a fundamental choice and changed history for the better. Now it’s our high calling to make that choice: between managed scarcity, or solid growth … between living in dependency on government handouts, or taking responsibility for our lives … between confiscating the earnings of some and spreading them around, or securing everyone’s right to the rewards of their work … between bureaucratic central government, or self-government … between the European social welfare state or the American idea of free market democracy.

What kind of nation do we wish to be? What kind of society will we hand down to our children and future generations? In the coming watershed election, the nature of this unique and exceptional land is at stake. We will choose one of two different paths. And once we make that choice, there’s no going back.

Add his impassioned floor speech before the final House vote on Obamacare, and his leadership with the Young Guns candidate recruitment effort, and Ryan is starting to look like the congressional Republican best suited to be the Washington counterweight to President Obama.  For conservatives who don’t think we can wait until January 2013 to inaugurate the next standard bearer, I hope we’re not overlooking the right guy in favor of the one who’s next in line.

Today’s Washington Post carries an op-ed from Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), dissecting this afternoon’s farcical “mark-up” session in the House Budget Committee.  On display will be Obamacare in the form of a “Reconciliation” vehicle.  Like all other stops on the health care “reform” debate, there is almost no chance of Republicans getting in a word, much less an amendment.

No matter.  Ryan is still promoting both his Roadmap for America’s Future and one of many pieces of targeted legislation Republicans have introduced to address the cost and quality of healthcare.  Here is a link to the Patients Choice Act, a document that simply and clearly explains the concept of health care exchanges.  The time it takes to read this brisk 13 pages will be better spent than all the detail-less drivel from breathless reporters repeating rumors of congressional whip counts.