Ryan Not Afraid To Tackle Tough Issues
August 13, 2012 7 Comments
The Romney/Ryan ticket seems to be popular with the GOP base. Around 10,000 people attended rallies in North Carolina and Wisconsin featuring Paul Ryan. Does it matter? In the long run pulling 10,000 for a rally a day after a big announcement probably doesn’t. It does suggest though that the base is pretty excited about Ryan. There’s something to be said for that but it doesn’t matter long term even if bores like Portman and Pawlenty wouldn’t have attracted half the number. What matters is how the Romney campaign operates from here on out. The big race begins now.
There are some on the left salivating over the Ryan selection as though he represents some radical vision of the Tea Party. The left wants to talk about Ryan’s medicare overhaul, it’s a debate worth having. Obamacare cut Medicare by $700 billion. Shall we dispense with the ads showing Paul Ryan throwing granny over a cliff? Ryan’s budget brings issues into the forefront that we need to debate in this country. We cannot afford $1 trillion annual deficits. We already have a national debt over $15 trillion, we cannot afford more debt. Paul Ryan has offered budget that starts to fix the problem. What has Obama offered? A budget that didn’t get a single vote in either House of Congress.
The Medicare issue is one that needs to be debate. The Ryan plan is to keep Medicare as it is for those currently on Medicare and for those over the age of 55. In short, the current system will remain in place for those retired or nearing retirement. For them nothing changes. The change is for those who are still young, likely not focused on their retirement health insurance. For us the system changes to a voucher system, wherein we buy our health insurance from a private insurer with the government picking up a portion of the tab. This would save money by eliminating government bureaucrats and it would free up the free market in health care.
Is the Ryan Medicare proposal perfect? Of course not, no government solution to a government created problem ever is. But it moves the Federal government towards fiscal sanity. We are fast approaching a point where we can no longer afford massive entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare. There is going to come a point in the next decade or two when we won’t have enough young workers paying into the system, thus more will be going out than coming in. Ryan wants to reform these programs now rather than wait until it’s to late in 20 years. This is a debate we need to have, Paul Ryan has at least given us something to discuss.
The Democrats don’t want any discussion of entitlement reform, even if we’re only talking about entitlement reform for those not near retirement age. These guys want never ending cradle to grave entitlements that apparently never cease or cost to much. Wanting to reform a failing system brings cries of outrage and ads showing Republican Congressmen throwing grandma off a cliff or eating dog food. For all the things we can complain about concerning Washington politics, Ryan isn’t part of the problem. He isn’t the one bucking responsibility or doing nothing while the government collapses into a sea of debt. He’s offered something, apparently the Democrats are to afraid to discuss his proposal in a serious way.
This is why the Ryan pick is so good. I get the sense that the public is tired of the never ending personal attacks and the refusals to tackle tough issues in a bipartisan manner. (Ryan’s medicare proposal is supported by a Democrat from Oregon) People are tired of talking about Bain Capital and Romney’s tax returns. No one is interested in Obama’s birth certificate or how he got into Columbia University. The country wants its leaders to offer solutions and reach some sort of bipartisan consensus. The Democrats think Paul Ryan will be easy to pick apart, that isn’t going to be the case. The public is going to grow to like him over the next couple months because he’s going to talk about ideas and he’s going to offer an alternative to the failed Obama plan.
About Steven
I guess I don’t see the ‘tough choices’. I tend to agree more with Charles Pierce:
“He does not have the raw balls to explain to the country that, no, he does not believe in government — not the federal government, anyway, and not as it was originally conceived, as the fundamental expression of a political commonwealth. He’s grandfathered his plan to chloroform Medicare so that, despite the deficit that he considers such an urgent problem, nobody alive today who might vote against him will be affected by it. For the same reason, he will not specify the cuts that he will make or the tax “loopholes” —coughMortgageInterestDeductioncough — that he will close. In any way that will come to matter to the people whose lives his policies will make harder and more miserable, Paul Ryan is still the high-school kid living off Social Security survivor benefits and reading Ayn Rand by flashlight under the sheets. Instead, he’s a guy pretending to be something he’s not, and doing so back in Janesville in a very swell Georgian mansion, which just happens to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places.”
It’s sort of hard to take this sort of a statement seriously when Ryan voted for TARP and the auto bailout and offers a budget that doesn’t dream of actually balancing until a decade from now.
That is exactly the point Pierce is making: far from ‘not afraid to tackle tough issues’, he is a political coward.
Nonsense, he’s taking on entitlement reform which is a tough issue that the country has to debate.
Bah. “Entitlement reform” (whatever that means) has been on the table forever – remember Bush pushing for privatization of SS? What would show real commitment and willingness to actually tackle tough issues would be, you know, tackling tough issues.
Turning Medicare into a voucher system and privitizing social security are tackling tough issues if your goal is to save them. Personally, I’d let these things rot because no amount of reform will ever save them from being a fiscal disaster for the country. It’s like education reform, there isn’t a reform package out there that can save a system that was flawed in its creation. But if we must reform these things, Ryan at least looks to cut the cost over the long haul which is more than you can say for the Democrats who want to spend more.
You have articulated exactly why the choice of Paul Ryan is so great. It should serve to bring the issues we need to be discussing and working on to the front of the debate.