The Weekly Standard: Paul Ryan's Express
Sunday, February 7, 2010 at 12:50PM The following article will appears in the current edition of The Weekly Standard. It's an excellent profile of the rising GOP star and likely future leader of the conservative movement.
Representative Paul Ryan’s 40th birthday coincided with the House GOP retreat in Baltimore on January 29. Ryan’s wife and three children joined him for the event. President Obama was also there, at the invitation of the House Republican leadership, to deliver remarks and answer questions from selected members. And he had a surprise in store for the six-term Wisconsin Republican: a spur-of-the-moment, presidential-level debate over the federal budget.
Hmm, Ryan thought. This is interesting. The two engaged in a back-and-forth over the president’s increase in discretionary spending during fiscal year 2010. Later, Obama said that Ryan, the ranking member of the House Budget and Ways & Means Committees, is “a pretty sincere guy” with “a beautiful family.” Later still, the two went at it once more, this time over the politics of Medicare. “I want to make sure that I’m not being unfair to your proposal,” Obama said.
He was talking about Ryan’s “Roadmap for America’s Future,” an ambitious plan to overhaul the welfare state and pay off the national debt (you can read the 95-page document at www.americanroadmap.org). For Americans under 55, the Roadmap would fundamentally restructure Medicare and Medicaid through means-tested vouchers, while introducing opt-in personal accounts to Social Security. It would replace the corporate income tax with a business consumption tax; repeal the Alternative Minimum, dividend, capital gains, and estate taxes; and reduce the six current tax brackets to two—one at 10 percent, the other at 25 percent. And that’s not all. Other parts of the plan include job training programs, budgetary reforms, and a free-market health care proposal modeled on Ryan’s Patients Choice Act. “This works,” Ryan told me last week. “It solves our fiscal crisis. It turns it around.” The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office agrees with him.
No question, the Roadmap is a big idea. But it isn’t a new one. Ryan initially released the proposal in 2008, when it fell flat. “First they laughed at us, then they ignored us,” says Representative Devin Nunes of California, a Ryan ally.
What’s changed? America has fallen into a vat of red ink. The financial crisis and recession have darkened the country’s long-term fiscal outlook. Unemployment stands at 9.7 percent. The president’s fiscal year 2011 budget forecasts record deficits and debt long into the future. Inflation, punishing interest rates, high taxes, and economic stagnation are not far behind. Hence the Democrats, who can’t defend their own budgets, desperately want to change the subject. They’ve found one they like: what’s wrong with Ryan’s Roadmap.
Obama, White House budget chief Peter Orszag, and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman Chris Van Hollen have all attacked Ryan’s proposal as hurting the elderly. So has the Democratic National Committee and the White House-friendly media. In his latest column, Time magazine’s Joe Klein writes that the Roadmap is “an all-out assault on the financial security of the nation’s most devout voters.” The Washington Post’s domestic policy blogger wrote last week that “Ryan’s budget proposes reforms that are nothing short of violent.”
Not so. Ryan preserves the current entitlement system for everyone over the age of 55. Nor do the critics mention that the only way to avoid a fiscal crisis decades from now is by means-testing benefits, raising the retirement age, and otherwise reducing the government’s future obligations. The alternative is insolvency and “austerity plans” imposed by the IMF.
Liberals accuse Ryan of cutting future Medicare benefits. True enough—but they’re missing the point. “Any reform would do that,” he says. “They want to do it by a government monopoly and rationing. We attack the root cause of health care inflation by introducing free-market mechanisms into the system.”
Ryan’s political problem is that he’s a congressman with a presidential-level agenda. The Roadmap is a realistic way to clean up America’s fiscal mess, but there is no chance of it becoming law as long as Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid run Congress and Barack Obama is president. Moreover, Bush’s failed Social Security reform and Obama’s doomed health bill show that a president has to have large congressional majorities as well as public approval to pass major changes to entitlement law.
What the Roadmap needs is support from a Republican presidential aspirant. Ryan insists it won’t be him, however. He says he has no plans to run for president in 2012. His disavowal, he goes on, is “Shermanesque.”
That may disappoint conservatives and Republicans who have found Ryan to be an engaging television presence and a successful political entrepreneur. He’s young, charismatic, wonky, and well spoken. He’s already held his own against President Obama. His national profile is on the rise. He recently endorsed conservative favorite Marco Rubio in the Florida Senate Republican primary. He’s scheduled to speak at two fundraisers in New Hampshire later this month.
Devin Nunes jokes that he’s the charter member of the “Draft Ryan” club. As the budget outlook grows darker, expect membership in the club to rise. Because sometimes you don’t pick the moment. Sometimes the moment picks you.
Matthew Continetti is associate editor of The Weekly Standard and author of The Persecution of Sarah Palin.
Reader Comments (7)
This guy is the man. Future Republican presidential nominee. The media would have a tough time hanging the typical "stupid Republican" title on him.
Ryan is definitely the future. Watch for the media to start trying to tear this guy down. They know he is a coming threat to their socialist goals.
Yeah, I'm concerned about that as well TB. You know they will get the knives out for him sooner or later. He actually has answers to some of the problems we face. Last thing they want is for that to get out.
LIberals don't want solutions that actually work. They want measures that preserve and consolidate their power disguised as solutions. The true litmus test is Joe Klein, if he supports it you don't need to read further to know which side to take. TB is right, anyone becoming a threat to the left will be targeted and their family with suffer. But our side is becoming emboldened by things like winning the Massachusetts seat and the positive reception Judd Gregg has gotten for taking a strong stand. Regular Joe-six packs like me and I suspect the others who post here are paying attention and keeping score like never before.
Peter Orszag, Chris Van Hollen, DNC and the Whitehouse -friendly media (pass the barf bag) has attacked Rep. Paul Ryan...thats good enough for me to know they must fear him for this is their only
line of defense...After the debate at the GOP retreat between Rep Ryan and Obonzo about the federal
budget, its for sure the President needs to put Superchargers on his teleprompters because Ryan ate his breakfast and his lunch...This is one cool man with all the horsepower under the hood to take him
a long way...Can you believe what a ticket with Rep Ryan and Gov Palin would do to the Liberals and
Obonzo's media boot-lickers, they would line themselves up against a wall and beg someone to shoot
fast and hard....
I know that I promised in an earlier post that I would not go off topic again, but I must. Forgive me, but I don't know how else to do this.
I absolutely love this site, so I took time to read quite a lot of the articles from the archives. And I have a request for one of the people who used to post here.
CRUNKALIOUS, please,please come back. PLEASE!! Don't deny me this. I know that you are still reading, but what can I do to get you to start posting again.
I know Fl Pundit would like to have you back, but he has too much dignity to beg. Dignity has never been highly valued in my family, so I am taking it upon myself to put out this plea to you. If you have any sense of compassion, you will start puking your liberal guts out again on this site. I can't believe that I only missed you by about three weeks.
Come back and tell us again how Scott Brown has no chance to beat Martha Coakley. Tell us again how you are going to bring your friends onto this site and set all these pigs straight. Please!
I know you are reading this and I know you are thinking that you have a huge disadvantage in a debate because you would be arguing liberal values(oxymoron). Now I can't speak for other posters, but here is what I am willing to do while debating you just to make it more fair.
While typing, I will wear heavy leather gloves, stand on one foot, and balance a rabbit on my head. If you still think my conservative values give me too big of an advantage, I will buy a rooster, and I will try to place kernels of corn on the keys of my keyboard and hopefully when the rooster pecks the corn he will press the proper letters.
I know, I know, you still don't think it would be fair, but you would make all us pigs so happy if you would just come back.
Sorry, Fl Pundit, I'm sure I broke a site rule here somewhere.
No worries HB, I'd like to have the whacko back myself. I think she (it) was so humiliated in her last post, that she decided not to write anything else. Frankly, I'd like to get a few more crazies like her throwing stuff against the wall here, but they are rarely able to defend their positions because they are largely indefensible.