NY Times: It’s Paul Ryan Time!
Conservative American Paul Ryan
Conservative American Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin is making a big name for himself lately. He’s one of the good guys and we’re happy to see the national media paying more attention to him.
A frequent criticism leveled at “the party of No” is that no alternatives are offered. It’s a lie, but it makes a nice sound bit for the liberal news media. Paul Ryan is man who does have alternative plans. And, the New York Times noticed:
“Across the first thirteen months of the Obama era, Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan, the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, has been one of the few conservative politicians offering detailed alternatives to the Democratic agenda. When Obama released his initial budget, Ryan responded by issuing a sweeping fiscal roadmap that envisioned bringing the U.S. budget back into balance across the next three decades. While many of his fellow Republicans were greeting Obama’s health care push with Medicare demagoguery, Ryan was busy co-sponsoring (with Tom Coburn, among others) the “Patients’ Choice Act,” an imperfect but impressive alternative to the Democrats’ approach. And now, with the release of Obama’s second budget, which projects deficits as far as the eye can see, Ryan has updated his fiscal roadmap as well — and suddenly, people are paying attention to him.”
They are paying attention because Ryan’s plans make sense! He proposes a simplified tax code, “consisting of a two-bracket income tax with a large standard deduction and a business consumption tax, would pay for a means-tested safety net, and a system of tax credits, risk pools and low-income subsidies would underwrite a free (or, well, somewhat freer) market in health care. In other words, Ryan would balance our books by shifting away from programs that shuffle money around within the middle and upper-middle classes — taking tax dollars with one hand and giving health-insurance deductions, college-tuition credits, home-mortgage deductions, Social Security checks and so forth with the other — and toward programs that tax the majority of Americans to fund means-tested support for the old, the sick, and the poor.”
Ryan told the Times: ““I pay off the debt completely, and over time I wipe all these unfunded liabilities off the books. But if we do half that, that’s fantastic.” And he was emphatic, in our conversation, about the plausibility of bipartisan conversation: “I’m just trying to get this debate going. I put this plan out there is hoping that other people would do the same thing, and then we can start debating it.”
