AND ALL THAT REMAINS OF THE GOP IN CONGRESS...:

Hide and Seek: The GOP talks a good game about reducing the federal deficit. So why is it ignoring Rep. Paul Ryan's detailed Roadmap? (Peter Suderman, Mar 2, 2010, Newsweek)

According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which produces Congress's official projections about the long-term fiscal effects of legislation, Ryan's Roadmap for America’s Future would zero out the deficit, balance the budget by 2063, and reduce Medicare's expected share of the economy in 2080 from a projected 14.3 percent of GDP to a mere 4 percent. The Roadmap also calls for a substantial simplification of the tax code and a replacement of the corporate income tax with an 8.5 percent business consumption tax. CBO's projections are inherently uncertain—even the most competent economic forecasters can only guess at how the world will change over 50-plus years. But the result is, at the very least, a compelling conservative vision of the country's fiscal future.

In other words, it's a thoroughly radical idea. But talk to Ryan about the plan, and he'll insist that, despite all evidence to the contrary, drastic as it sounds, the American people are ready for it. "They know the fiscal situation's bad," he tells NEWSWEEK. "They know this debt is wrong. They know we've got a problem." Yet despite its concerns about the deficit, the public is also deeply attached to Social Security and Medicare.

And that's why Republicans are so skittish about Ryan's plan. Indeed, it's not clear that many of his fellow GOP legislators are willing to sign up for Ryan's hard-core brand of fiscal responsibility. Electorally, his plan may be more of a problem for the GOP than a solution. To date, his proposal, which is actually an update of a plan he initially put forth in 2008, has a mere nine cosponsors—mostly conservative stalwarts. A number of prominent Republicans, including presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty and House Minority Leader John Boehner, have explicitly declined to support the proposal. At the same time, GOP leaders like Mitch McConnell, Michael Steele, and Newt Gingrich have all released statements staunchly opposing cuts to Medicare—the same sort of cuts that are crucial to Ryan's plan.

So Ryan's proposal is instructive not only because it clarifies the difference between liberal and conservative policy, which is that serious reductions in government mean serious reductions in popular entitlements; it's also instructive about the road ahead for the GOP.

...is its hard care, which refused these reforms when W offered them but then complained he was a big spender.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 3, 2010 6:35 AM