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Rep. Paul Ryan is not the president of the United States, it just feels that way, The Path to Prosperity

Filling the Leadership Vacuum, Paul Ryan Addresses the Nation



Rep. Paul Ryan is not the president of the United States, it just feels that way.

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Among other functions it should the role of the president, in times of both peril and optimism, to gird and inspire us. We expect our presidents to spur our actions and capture our imaginations as they explain why they must lead us to war, or to the moon. As we are about to engulfed by debt it should be the president offering innovation and reform to avert a nation-ending financial catastrophe. Buts since our actual elected president seems woefully inadequate to this task, or to any other action resembling mature governing, it has fallen to the serious Paul Ryan to assume the role of chief executive and truth-teller Ryan has gifted America with the The Path to Prosperity, what The Wall Street Journal calls “the most serious attempt to reform government in a generation.” The plan outlined by Ryan is a slim document pregnant with risk because it is specific and calls for neutering and taming of the fattest sacred cows comprising our modern welfare state: Medicare and Medicaid. With a display of courage, conviction and coherence Ryan explains how the defining characteristics of American capitalism are threatened by our unsustainable state largesse. Perhaps even more important than analyzing and questioning the specific details of Ryan’s proposals we should ask: Why is this youthful congressman and not the sitting president leading us through our entitlement wasteland to sustainable fiscal pastures? Certainly FDR and Reagan would have, but then they commanded a certain presence, while our current leader is merely present. In explaining the core components of his government makeover Ryan writes in the WSJ:
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 Sandroff -- Bio and Archives

Claude writes regularly on politics, energy and science.  He is a former research scientist currently working with high tech companies in Silicon Valley.


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