Ryan vs Obama: Where is the real change?

Editorial
Union Leader [NH]
4/7/2011

How far beyond its means is the federal government spending? Consider this:

The Republican budget plan presented by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., this week would spend $6.2 trillion less than President Obama’s budget does over the next decade. Democrats call that radical and destructive. And yet Ryan’s budget would still take decades to eliminate deficit spending. That’s how big our debt problem is.

Regarding Ryan’s budget, The Washington Post concluded yesterday: “Annual deficits would dwindle to less than $400 billion by the end of the decade, a dramatic improvement over Obama’s budget proposal.” By contrast, the Congressional Budget Office now figures Obama’s annual budget deficit to be $1.16 trillion by 2021: 2.75 times higher than Ryan’s.

In February, President Obama said: “What my budget does is to put forward some tough choices, some significant spending cuts so that by the middle of this decade our annual spending will match our annual revenues. We will not be adding more to the national debt.”

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Politifact.com rated that statement “false.” According to the CBO, during the next decade Obama’s budget would spend a total of $9.5 trillion that we don’t have.

What we do have is a President who is lying to the American people. He says his budgets balance when they don’t. He says he controls spending when spending rockets upward.

In contrast to President Obama’s, Ryan’s budget is a deeply serious and honest document. Obama raises spending to more than 24 percent of Gross Domestic Product over the next decade. Ryan’s plan cuts that to less than 20 percent, close to its modern historical average.

Ryan offers the American people what Obama said he would offer but never did: an actual change in the status quo that controls spending and begins to restrain entitlement programs. Finally, change America can believe in.

Update: Legal Insurrection, “The safety net for the poor is coming apart at the seams.”

…Ryan’s adult plan to save the safety net, makes a point I’ve made last June in response to a claim by Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) that Republicans had a lack of compassion for the unemployed because Republicans wanted an extension of unemployment insurance to be paid for rather than funded through further national debt.

The cruel ones are the people like Whitehouse, the Obama administration, and the Democratic Party which do not show the courage to confront our fiscal problems, and therefore put the entire structure of safety nets at risk…

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