James Pethokoukis, Reuters:
Is Rep. Paul Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” potentially the most important and necessary piece of economic legislation since President Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts in 1981? Quite likely. The blueprint embraces free markets and individual choice to radically reshape America’s social welfare state for the 21st century and shrink government. Instead of looking for ways to finance an ever-expanding public sector, it would prevent Washington from growing to a projected 45 percent of GDP by 2050 (vs. 24 percent today) and instead reduce it to just under 15 percent by that year. Ryan would downsize government to its smallest size since 1950 and prevent the Europeanization of the American economy. The Ryan Path embraces dynamic growth, not managed decline and stagnation.
But what’s really important is that it affirmatively answers three questions: First, does the Ryan Path put the federal government on a sustainable fiscal path? Second, does it promote more economic growth and higher incomes? Third, is it politically realistic?
[…]
The risk is that Paul Ryan has created a plan only Paul Ryan can sell with his passion and deep expertise. He does make political concessions. The plan doesn’t, for instance, cut Medicare spending on current retirees or older workers. But austerity of that sort probably isn’t needed yet. Current trends, though, are leading toward a fiscal crisis that would result in both extreme and immediate benefit cuts and higher taxes.
And that, ultimately, is how the political case is made. The alternative to the Ryan Path isn’t the fiscally unsustainable status quo, but a future of harsh austerity beset by financial crisis, stifled by higher interest rates and marred by a lower standard of living. In short, the death of the American Dream and the collapse of any social safety net.
But there is a way forward to another American Century and away from that nightmare. And Ryan has found it.
Here’s the real question: just how many in the GOP establishment are actually interested in downsizing government — as opposed to mouthing such conservative-friendly platitudes to keep their places in power and save themselves a stool at an ever-expanding government trough.
My guess is, it’s fewer than most people think.
So how this gets sold — and if it gets sold at all — is, as Pethokoukis points out, really key.
And that’s where the new TEA Party contingent comes in. Dispirited thus far by an establishment leadership that still believes it is negotiating with good-faith actors on the Dem side, this is their chance to do what they came to Washington to do: push for and achieve real reform of the kind that will point the nation back in the direction of its founding.
As Paul Ryan rightly noted today, it makes no sense to try to bracket the “moral” element to this reform: either we believe in a free society, one of opportunity and individual liberty based built around a competitive and vibrant market system and a rule of law; or else we don’t, and we’ll trade our liberties for the managed decline of a cradle to grave welfare state that will, inevitably, fail — leaving our children and grandchildren to suffer under the debt, burdened by unelected bureaucracies who constrain every aspect of their lives.
This is a choice. But it’s not just an economic choice. That’s where Mitch Daniels gets it wrong, in my opinion: you cannot bracket the moral questions that redound to debates over individual freedom vs. managed social welfare.
Slavery is immoral, even when it’s managed by an ostensibly beneficent nanny state. And when freedom is taken away from the civil society — but the society itself remains — slavery is the condition we’re left in.
The fight we’re having is, in a very real sense, an existential one. And I for one wasn’t born to be a slave — and I’ll be damned if I let my son become the property of some bloated bureaucratic monolith.
My guess is that most, if not all, of the tea-partiers will line up behind this. And as you note, it will be illuminating which among the more “Rockefeller” Republicans will balk, or be squishy at best.
Hell, I say tack Rand Paul’s 500 billion dollar cut proposal on top of this mutha!
I also think that Ryan articulates the linkage between the burgeoning nanny state, crushing debt, and the loss of liberty better than any I can recall. I like the fact that he keeps emphasizing that we are now at a crossroads, and one fork leads back towards the nation our founders intended, and the other, the one the progressives have put us on, leads to Euro-socialist malaise.
And if we stay on that path, well, we’re forked!
Unfettered hatred, thy name is today’s building progressive backlash. This is where rhetoric clashes with reality and I don’t think clashes is too strong a word.
Heard an ad on the radio today from the “American Federation of Government Employees” that had a phrase running through it that from looking around the web may be the new meme pushed. “Wrecking ball. As in cutting back on “public employees” (another phrase repeated over and over) is taking a “wrecking ball” to our economy and nation.
That’s one wrecking ball I’d be more than happy to swing. It makes sense that if you are going to cut government, you’re going to cut government employees. But cutting government will spur private growth. And those workers who lose government gigs will have to learn to work in the private sector.
Not only do we need to cut employees, we need to cut salaries and benefit. No, really. Sorry ’bout that.
not sure why this makes me giggle. It’s not like I haven’t worked with people with a similar work ethic in the private sector.
“I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4AXPMkrVq4
The White House:
Obama 2012 slogan: “They’re gonna kill Grandma!”
Need proof of that? Here ya go. New DNC chair revealed: Debbie Wasserman-Schultz
I’m getting a really good feeling about this.
Debbie Wasserman-Schultz will do to baracky reelection what clinton-powers-rice did to libya
Ms. Wasserman-Schultz is a smooth criminal indeed…
Her rapid fire talking point dissemination, willful lying, obnoxious shout-down style, and her nasal and grating New York accent won’t endear her with many outside of L.A. and the upper west side.
But she has the qualifications; she embraces the big lie, and repeats it as if it were
gospelstraight out of ObaMao’s little red book.“Our debt is out of control. What was a fiscal challenge is now a fiscal crisis. We cannot deny it; instead we must, as Americans, confront it responsibly. And that is exactly what Republicans pledge to do.”
– Paul Ryan
If only Paul Ryan were the President of China . . . er, wait . . . or something.
So that’s where little Che Guacamole got to!
That was spot on Jeff, Bravo! I’m standing on my chair clapping furiously.
I don’t have a problem with letting the wrecking ball swing. I still prefer the rhetorical meat ax though. Wrecking balls are fun, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t want to destroy everything.
We have to preserve our countries founding vision, that of free men thriving though free enterprise. We need to hack off the leeches, and the ropes and chains that restrain us. We have to chop the cancerous tumor of class envy out, so everyone can take responsibility for their own fortune, and restore the equal opportunity to go as far as any individuals industry will take them.
My doubts arise not from lack of a plan, or the thought it’s too late to do anything. Where I am pessimistic is, I doubt there are enough true and noble men left in the country. Free men, that know independence relies on personal responsibility, and freedom must be guarded and passed on, not traded for promises of safety or effortless prosperity.
In the world of “reality” TV, today’s pleasures crowd out any thought of honor, or duty to the next generation. In fact, “honor” and “duty” are as foreign a concept to too many modern Americans as dueling and debtors prison.
Reality is but a concept in our society, and anarchy is romanticized. I despair the vengeance of truth.
“We need to hack off the leeches, ”
debbie w-s will be asking you to tone down the rhetoric
[…] Jeff G. at Protein Wisdom gives a great analysis of James Pethokoukis’ article on the continuing of Reagan’s […]
newrouter, Debbie can fuck herself with a swordfish sideways.
Daniels on Ryan.
WSJ
More opinions on Ryan’s plan from David Brooks, Ezra Klein, Ross Douthat, NRO’s Reihan Salam and Mickey Kaus who sees it as suicide since they previous four liked it at least a bit.
I think the wrecking ball metaphor works surprisingly well. Consider that over the past hundred years or so, the Proggs have built a huge, elaborate, unstable edifice atop our nation’s foundations, and that great leaning tower of statism now threatens to tip over and squash Main Street flat.
Knocking the federal government down to its foundations seems like the only prudent course of action, really.