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Ryan's Charge Up Entitlement Hill
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Issue
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| Contributor | Imperator |
| Last Edited | Imperator Feb 19, 2011 01:02pm |
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| Category | Editorial |
| Author | PAUL A. GIGOT |
| Media | Newspaper - Wall Street Journal |
| News Date | Saturday, February 19, 2011 07:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Paul Ryan doesn't look like the menacing sort. He's amiable in a familiar Midwestern way, his disposition varies between cheerfully earnest and wry, and he uses words like "gosh." Yet to hear Democrats tell it, the 41-year-old Republican congressman is the evil genius, the cruel and mad budget cutter who threatens grandma's health care, grandad's retirement, and the entitlement state as we know it.
Senate Democrats like Chuck Schumer issue almost daily press releases attacking Mr. Ryan, Paul Krugman is obsessed and demeaning, and even President Obama can't stop mentioning him. Only this week, the president justified his own failure to tackle entitlements in his dud of a 2012 budget by saying that "the chairman of the House Republican budgeteers didn't sign on" to the final report of Mr. Obama's deficit commission.
What are they all so afraid of?
"Did he really say that?" asks Mr. Ryan about the president, sitting in his House office this week after another day of the hearings he now runs as chairman of the House Budget Committee. "I'm actually flattered." Perhaps they're worried, he says, "because we put out more than just bromides and platitudes. We put out specifics."
He certainly has done that, most famously with his "Road Map" that is the full monty of conservative tax and entitlement reform. Mr. Ryan knows it won't pass, not even in the current GOP House, but he drew it up in 2009 to start a debate and show that a future of limited government was still possible. He adds that he opposed the Obama deficit commission report because it failed to do anything serious about health-care entitlements, and he proposed an alternative that the commission rejected. Mr. Obama has never proposed his alternative.
Has the president ever called him to talk? "Never once," he says, notwithstanding Mr. Obama's many public statements that he wants "aggressive" conversations with Republicans, especially Mr. Ryan. "He keeps saying that," says the Wisconsin native, but |
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