William Murchison
The American Spectator
4/1/2010
… Paul Ryan, a hero already to the audience on account of his unsparing assaults on the premises of health care reform, Obama-style, has no doubt a momentous choice lies ahead of Americans — to continue in the progressive rut being worn in the soil, or…wait a minute, that’s no choice.
“We are quickly approaching a debt crisis in this country.” Our present trajectory endangers our fiscal stability, such as it is. In a few decades, to pay for the government we’ve ordered up, the bottom — bottom! — tax bracket will be 25 percent, the highest bracket 88 percent. This, according to Congressional Budget Office calculations. Climate legislation alone, as contemplated by the administration, would require another $1 trillion in spending. And this on top of stupendous shortfalls in our ability to finance Social Security and Medicare without reconfiguration of the pay-in, pay-out scheme.
“We are reaching a tipping point in this country.” The figures cascade from Ryan’s fluent tongue. Right now 20 percent of Americans get 75 percent of their income from the federal government. An additional 20 percent get 40 percent of their income from the government. Sixty percent get more services in dollar value than they pay in taxes. If things don’t change, “we’re going to be a different kind of country” — to wit, “a European-style cradle-to-grave” society, wherein “more people depend on the welfare state than on themselves.”
None of which is set in concrete. Barack Obama and the Democrats, it seems clear, poked a hornet’s nest when they said boo-hiss to alternative ideas for making health care coverage more general and more affordable. “They were not interested,” Ryan says, “in setting up a true market for health care.” It’s not about health care, you see. “It’s about ideology” — the ideology of state control. Want more state control? Sit back; watch it happen.
Ryan offers few hard and fast predictions as to what the upcoming, pre-election months may hold, save for struggle. He doesn’t think the Democrats are prepared to muscle through cap and trade, as they muscled through Obamacare. Card check? Nope. Immigration “reform”? They’ll try…
…Paul Ryan, to the newsman whose memories of political figures go back to LBJ and Goldwater, looks very much like the real article: the leader conspicuously missing from Republican, much less conservative, affairs this past decade or so. It hurts not a bit that he started in politics as a staffer for Jack Kemp, the king of supply-side economics…
Read the complete article at The American Spectator.
