By Claude Sandroff ——Bio and Archives--April 9, 2011
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No one person or party is responsible for the looming crisis. Yet the facts are clear: Since President Obama took office, our problems have gotten worse. Major spending increases have failed to deliver promised jobs. The safety net for the poor is coming apart at the seams. Government health and retirement programs are growing at unsustainable rates. The new health-care law is a fiscal train wreck. And a complex, inefficient tax code is holding back American families and businesses.Because Ryan addresses so many of our fiscal challenges in a single document-healthcare, spending, and taxation- he delivers the most effective policy shellacking to Obama to date. Ryan was a member of Obama’s own deficit commission chaired by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, and he incorporates many of the commission’s recommendations. Obama comprehensively ignored all of them. Bowles and Simpson have praised Ryan’s plan. No politician, republican or democrat can ever face a questioner again without being asked what his own plan is to deal with entitlement reform, ruinous spending and our loathsome tax code. Everyone from this day forward will be compared to Ryan. And the comparison won’t begin with a derisive and dismissive reference to “Ryancare”, but will refer to a substantive and transformative program free of jargon and specially crafted, corrupt backroom deals. Ryan seems fearless and affable in full knowledge that the liberal hierarchy will seek to destroy him. He notes that Washington is stuffed with politicians but in dangerous deficit with respect to leaders. Ryan is willing to lead. Try as they must, democrats will find Ryan a difficult figure to demonize. He doesn’t bear too close a resemblance to the standard child-murderer and senior citizens will not quake in fear when he walks into their bingo hall. The Wisconsin republican is young (roughly half the age of the fossilized democrat leadership), calm, unthreatening and in total master of budgetary facts. His budget projections have been vetted by the Congressional Budget Office and the plan has the mystical imprimatur of bipartisanship, having been crafted in its earlier incarnations with the help of Alice Rivlin, Bill Clinton’s budget director. Those of us who claim to be hard-core, limited government constitutionalists have much to criticize in the Ryan Plan. Ryan neither deals directly with Social Security nor balances our budgets quickly enough. And many of us believe that government should have no role whatever in the health care choices of Americans. We hold this truth to be self-evident: Health care is not a fundamental right but merely a service that each of us should buy and pay for like a car wash. As such we would hope to see Medicare and Medicaid killed, not reformed; eliminated, not preserved. But such a leap would require a philosophical revolution whose foundation our country has yet to build and therefore our citizens would not accept. Perhaps President Ryan (who apparently requires his new staff to read Atlas Shrugged) or someone like him can lead us into that Promised Land.
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Claude writes regularly on politics, energy and science. He is a former research scientist currently working with high tech companies in Silicon Valley.