Tag Archives: Economy

News

Economist Paul Ryan disgusted with Obama’s childish emotional bloviating

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Republican economist Paul Ryan responds to the community-organizer/teleprompter-reader.

Here’s the transcript. (H/T Lonely Conservative)

Excerpt:

I’m very disappointed in the president. I was excited when we got invited to attend his speech today. I thought the president’s invitation to Mr. Camp, Mr. Hensarling and myself was an olive branch. Instead, what we got was a speech that was excessively partisan, dramatically inaccurate, and hopelessly inadequate to addressing our countries pressing fiscal challenges.

What we heard today was not fiscal leadership from our commander-in-chief. What we heard today was a political broadside from our campaigner-in chief.

I guess it’s no coincidence that last week when the president launched his billion dollar re-election campaign was the week we launched our effort to try and get this debt and deficit under control and get our economy growing.

Last year, in the absence of a serious budget, the president created a fiscal commission. Then with his budget he disavowed his fiscal commission. He ignored all of its recommendations. Now he wants to delegate leadership yet again to a new commission. How are we to expect different results? And the measurements of results of this new commission are lower than the measurements of success of the last commission that ended a few months ago.

We need leadership. We don’t need a doubling down on the failed politics of the past.

[…]Exploiting people’s emotions of fear, envy, and anxiety is not hope; it’s not change. It’s partisanship. We don’t need partisanship. We don’t need demagoguery. We need solutions. And we don’t need to keep punting to other people to make tough decisions. If we don’t make those decisions today, our children will have to make much, much tougher decisions tomorrow.

Paul Ryan and Jeb Hensarling are the two best-known Republican budget wonks.

You can read more about Paul Ryan in this Business Week interview.

Excerpt:

President Obama called your plan “a vision that says if our roads crumble and our bridges collapse, we can’t afford to fix them … but we can somehow afford more than $1 trillion in new tax breaks for the wealthy.” How do you respond?
I don’t even know what to say about that. First of all, we’re not even talking about cutting taxes. We’re talking about keeping tax revenues where they are [by making the Bush tax cuts permanent] and cleaning up all the junk in the tax code for a flatter, fair, simpler tax system. So we’re not talking about cutting taxes. We want to keep the tax revenues where they are and fix the tax code. And with respect to all the spending—you know, that partisan-spending rhetoric—if you don’t fix entitlements, Charlie, if you don’t get spending under control, there’s not going to be any money left for those other things, for roads, for bridges, for education, for the environment. So I’m amazed that he would use that kind of hyperbolic, hyperventilating rhetoric to describe our plan.

I find it interesting that last week we heard William Lane Craig chastise the child Sam Harris for making “stupid and insulting” remarks about Christians, we are now getting Paul Ryan making similar assessments of our naive, childish President. Have Christians and conservatives finally reached their limit of tolerating stupidity and incompetence?

More about Paul Ryan and his budget proposal in my previous post.

News

Democrats made funding of abortion providers non-negotiable in deal

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From the Wall Street Journal. (H/T Mary)

Excerpt:

On Friday, the federal government almost shut down over abortion, more than 38 years after Roe v. Wade was supposed to have settled the question. Politico reports on the Thursday-night negotiations over funding the government for the remainder of fiscal 2011:

The low point may have come Thursday night.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) had spent more than an hour meeting with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office, inching toward a deal to avert a shutdown, but he kept insisting that it include a prohibition against federal funding for Planned Parenthood.

That was a nonstarter for Obama. As the meeting was breaking up, Vice President Joe Biden told the speaker, in no uncertain terms, that his demand was unacceptable. If that became the deal breaker, Biden said, he would “take it to the American people,” who would presumably punish the GOP for shutting down the government over an ideological issue.

“They were faced with a choice–they would either have to give in or shut down the government,” said a senior administration official, describing how the negotiations went from there.

A Bloomberg account has Obama telling Boehner during the same meeting: “Nope, zero. John, this is it.” And that was it. The Republicans did well in the negotiation overall: “Boehner agreed to a package of $38.5 billion in cuts, a significant victory for a man who said his goal was to extract as much as possible from the federal budget,” Bloomberg reports. But they yielded on the question of subsidizing Planned Parenthood, America’s biggest abortion provider. (How big? Timothy Carney of the Washington Examiner reports that “it performed 332,278 abortions in 2009, while serving 7,021 prenatal clients and referring 977 parents to adoption services.”)

[…]There’s also a financial angle. Planned Parenthood receives millions in taxpayer subsidies and spends hundreds of thousands on lobbying and campaigning. In February, OpenSecrets.org reported that Planned Parenthood’s political action committee “donated more than $148,000 to federal candidates–almost all Democrats–during the 2010 election cycle” and “spent more than $443,000 overall.” Planned Parenthood made an additional $905,796 in “independent expenditures” during the 2010 cycle–exercising its right to free speech pursuant to last year’s Citizens United decision.

The biggest beneficiaries of Planned Parenthood money, according to OpenSecrets.org, were Sens. Patty Murray of Washington and Barbara Boxer of California. According to the Hill, both were also among “a defiant group of Senate women,” all Democrats, who “said Friday they’ll oppose any spending bill that would affect reproductive health funding”…

The Republicans tried, but the Democrats would not budge on funding abortion with taxpayer dollars.

Commentary

What’s wrong with the American economy and how Paul Ryan would fix it

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This is a pretty long, but very educational, article from National Review.

Here’s the intro:

There’s been an avalanche of commentary on Paul Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity,” and rightly so. Ryan’s proposal, which would reform entitlement spending, balance the budget, and begin paying off the debt, is the most important legislative proposal of my lifetime. It may not pass in its current form. But there is a much better chance than you’d think that it will pass in modified form, perhaps under another president. Either way, it will change the way we talk about the deficit and the debt for a very long time.

The plan is quite comprehensive, encompassing discretionary spending, defense spending, financial regulation, Fannie and Freddie, tax reform, welfare programs, and Medicare and Medicaid. (As David Brooks puts it, PTP “dodges Social Security,” which is acceptable, given Social Security’s lesser impact on our long-term fiscal problems.)

As for getting debt under control, here’s what the Congressional Budget Office had to say about the “Path to Prosperity”:

The resulting budget deficits under the proposal would be around 2 percent of GDP in the 2020s [down from 9 percent in 2010] and would decline during the 2030s. The budget would be in surplus by 2040 and show growing surpluses in the following decade. Federal debt would equal about 48 percent of GDP by 2040 and 10 percent by 2050.

And Yuval Levin has put together some nice charts, based on the CBO numbers, that show how dramatically PTP changes our country’s fiscal trajectory, relative to both current law and the Obama budget.

[…]So let’s sift through the most controversial aspects of the plan: those related to health-care entitlements. It’s going to be a rather wonky exercise, though I’ve done my best to make it readable by breaking it up into bite-sized chunks.

Here’s a summary of his nine points:

  1. It reduces the growth of Medicare and Medicaid spending so that it is similar to countries like France, Germany and Switzerland
  2. It reduces the costs of health care by letting individuals control how their own money is being spent – reducing demand naturally
  3. It lets individuals decide what medical insurance coverages they want – just like they do with auto insurance
  4. It mandates that seniors have to pay appropriate premiums for any extra medical insurance coverage they choose
  5. It encourages states to save money and to prevent fraud by giving them financial rewards for doing so
  6. It requires the rich to pay more for Medicare than the poor -by means-testing service provision
  7. It introduces a voucher system where the government gives each person money (e.g. – $15,000) to choose a plan they like
  8. The Democrat alternative to the “Path to Prosperity” plan is tax increases and rationing health care
  9. The CBO agrees that if we do nothing about entitlement spending, we will bankrupt the country

I really encourage my Christian readers to take a shot at reading this article. It is very important for us to be seen as being informed about policies down to the details, so that we can discuss things other than Christianity intelligently. No one is going to trust you to discuss spiritual things unless they can see that you have some familiarity with material things. The reason why Bill Craig can back atheists into an auditorium is because he understands things about cosmology, physics, history and philosophy. People trust him, because he knows what he is talking about. You have a plan for a Christian life too, and you need to be able to do a good job of making decisions. You need to understand your country’s economy in order to make good decisions. And not just voting decisions, but spending decisions, educational decisions, career decisions and investing decisions. And then when you talk about your faith to others in public, you can link it to all kinds of different public areas of knowledge. So that Christianity will come up naturally, no matter what the topic is.

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