At least Paul Ryan is seriously proposing a plan with actual numbers involved, let’s see what Obama’s plan is. If Obama (and it appears that he does) wants to play the typical class warfare game with the American public then all we need to do is nominate a real fiscal conservative and the voters will actually have a choice. If they reelect Obama – they have no right to complain.
by Charles Krauthammer
The most serious charge against Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget is not the risible claim, made most prominently by President Obama in his George Washington University address, that it would “sacrifice the America we believe in.” The serious charge is that the Ryan plan fails by its own standards: Because it only cuts spending without raising taxes, it accumulates trillions in debt and doesn’t balance the budget until the 2030s. If the debt is such a national emergency, the critics say, Ryan never really gets you there from here.
But they miss the point. You can’t get there from here without Ryan’s plan. It’s the essential element. Of course Ryan is not going to propose tax increases. You don’t need Republicans for that. That’s what Democrats do. The president’s speech was a prose poem to higher taxes — with every allusion to spending cuts guarded by a phalanx of impenetrable caveats.
Ryan reduces federal spending by $6 trillion over 10 years — from the current 24 percent of gross domestic product to the historical post-World War II average of about 20 percent.
Now, the historical average for revenue over the past 40 years is between 18 percent and 19 percent of GDP. As we return to that level with the economic recovery (we’re now at about 15 percent), Ryan would still leave us with an annual deficit in 2021 of 1.6 percent of GDP.
The critics are right to focus on that gap. But it is bridgeable. And the mechanism for doing so is in plain sight: tax reform.
[…]
Given the Democrats’ instinctive resort to granny-in-the-snow demagoguery, the Republicans are right not to budge on taxes until serious spending cuts are in place. At which point, the grand compromise awaits. And grand it would be. Saving the welfare state from insolvency is no small achievement.
Read the rest: The grand compromise
Tags: Charles Krauthammer
