Tag Archives: Path to Prosperity

Videos

Andrew Klavan compares the Ryan budget to the Obama budget

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Andrew Klavan on the culture. (H/T Club For Growth)

Douglas Groothuis also tweeted this Fox News article by Paul Ryan, in which Ryan talks about the current economic crisis and his plan to address the issues.

Excerpt:

There are three main reasons why the president’s policies have made this recovery weaker than usual:

1. Regulatory uncertainty: After the stimulus passed, the president turned his attention immediately to costly overhauls of the nation’s financial and health-care sectors. These overhauls needlessly transferred more control over America’s economy to government bureaucrats in Washington, without fixing the problems they were intended to address. The transfer of so much power to the arbitrary dictates of federal regulators has made it hard for businesses to plan for the future with confidence, and things will remain this way until these laws are replaced with real reforms.

2. Tax uncertainty: The president’s ad hoc tax policies, with a mix of tax hikes on job creators and temporary rebates for others being the hallmarks of his approach, have left businesses in the lurch. Moreover, the president’s new health care law imposes a crushing $800 billion tax hike, and he continues to threaten businesses and families with higher rates in the future, even as he dithers on his vague promise to address America’s uncompetitive corporate tax rate, which is the highest in the developed world.

3. Debt uncertainty: The president has not put forward a plan that saves Medicare from bankruptcy, even though nonpartisan experts tell us that this could happen in 9-13 short years unless we act. Each year that we fail to put our critical government health and retirement programs on a path to long-term solvency, we are making trillions of dollars of unfunded promises to future retirees. We are already borrowing 40 cents of every dollar we spend, and Washington’s inability to solve its spending problems is leading rating agencies such as Standard & Poors to downgrade our credit outlook. Government under this administration is failing at its number-one economic job, which is to create a stable, predictable environment for job creators.

Also: One seniors group is already supporting the Ryan plan.

Videos

Paul Ryan responds to his critics on Medicare reform

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Here’s an article from the liberal Washington Post that quotes Ryan explaining why he made the video.

Excerpt:

We can no longer let politicians in Washington deny the danger to Medicare – the danger is all too real, and the health of our nation’s seniors is far too important. We have to save Medicare to avoid disruptions in benefits for current seniors, and to strengthen the program for future generations. House Republicans have put forward a plan to do just that. Democratic leaders in Congress have failed to produce a plan – it has been 755 days since Senate Democrats even passed a budget. Meanwhile, the President’s plan would empower a panel of 15 unelected bureaucrats to cut Medicare for current seniors, while failing to save the program for future retirees.

This video lays out the clear choice our nation faces on Medicare: Will Medicare become a program in which a board of bureaucrats manages its bankruptcy by denying care to seniors? Or will leaders work together to save and strengthen Medicare by empowering seniors to choose health care plans that work best for them, with less support for the wealthy and more help for the poor and the sick? House Republicans have advanced solutions to save Medicare. Instead of working with us, the leaders of the Democratic Party have opted to play politics with the health security of America’s seniors.

It’s probably the best video I’ve ever seen to explain the benefits of consumer-driven health care, as opposed to government-run rationing of health care by a board of unelected elites. Either we choose Paul Ryan’s plan or we pay our money and then wait in line for health care that someone else will approve, or not.

UPDATE: New video from Jennifer Rubin’s latest column:

I agree with him.

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.