70,000 children will die! Old people won’t be able to get their prescription medications! Blood will run in the streets! Dogs and cats, living together – it will be chaos (wait, that’s Ghostbusters, not the budget)! But, you can expect hyperbole along these lines when Democrats start screaming about the “draconian” cuts proposed in Paul Ryan’s Path to Prosperity. The new budget plan proposes to cut up to $6.2 trillion in spending from the ever-deepening federal budget hole – you know, the one that Obama wants to make even deeper with his latest outrageous budget.
The president’s recent budget proposal would accelerate America’s descent into a debt crisis. It doubles debt held by the public by the end of his first term and triples it by 2021. It imposes $1.5 trillion in new taxes, with spending that never falls below 23% of the economy. His budget permanently enlarges the size of government. It offers no reforms to save government health and retirement programs, and no leadership.
Our budget, which we call The Path to Prosperity, is very different. For starters, it cuts $6.2 trillion in spending from the president’s budget over the next 10 years, reduces the debt as a percentage of the economy, and puts the nation on a path to actually pay off our national debt. Our proposal brings federal spending to below 20% of gross domestic product (GDP), consistent with the postwar average, and reduces deficits by $4.4 trillion.
A study just released by the Heritage Center for Data Analysis projects that The Path to Prosperity will help create nearly one million new private-sector jobs next year, bring the unemployment rate down to 4% by 2015, and result in 2.5 million additional private-sector jobs in the last year of the decade. It spurs economic growth, with $1.5 trillion in additional real GDP over the decade. According to Heritage’s analysis, it would result in $1.1 trillion in higher wages and an average of $1,000 in additional family income each year.
The phrase going around is “time to have an adult discussion” about the budget and the deficit. Ryan and the GOP are making a serious effort to address the problem. Their plan takes bold steps to turn from the status quo by addressing:
• Reducing spending: This budget proposes to bring spending on domestic government agencies to below 2008 levels, and it freezes this category of spending for five years.
• Welfare reform: This budget will build upon the historic welfare reforms of the late 1990s by converting the federal share of Medicaid spending into a block grant that lets states create a range of options and gives Medicaid patients access to better care.
• Health and retirement security: This budget’s reforms will protect health and retirement security. This starts with saving Medicare. The open-ended, blank-check nature of the Medicare subsidy threatens the solvency of this critical program and creates inexcusable levels of waste.
• Budget enforcement: This budget recognizes that it is not enough to change how much government spends. We must also change how government spends. It proposes budget-process reforms—including real, enforceable caps on spending
• Tax reform: This budget would focus on growth by reforming the nation’s outdated tax code, consolidating brackets, lowering tax rates, and assuming top individual and corporate rates of 25%
These are just snippets of the major features of the plan. Read the whole thing at The Wall Street Journal. It’s full of reasoned ideas to attack a problem we must confront soon. Which means, of course, that the current progressive administration and its legions of dependents will hate it. Speaking of which, Smitty over at The Other McCain has some ideas for how we can start to convince those legions that they’re not entitled to all those entitlement programs.
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