I am crushing on Paul Ryan SO HARD after reading this article about him. And I’m perfectly aware that I’ve written about him so much in the last several months that you guys are probably like, “OK, Mock. We get it. You like Paul Ryan. Enough already.”
But you need to read that article, you guys. Lemme just give you some quick highlights.
As you know, Ryan is the creator of The Roadmap, a proposal which targets healthcare, the tax code, trade policy, and entitlements all in one spot. He also created his own budget proposal which ERASES the long-term deficit. His proposals include privatizing Medicare and Medicaid, providing vouchers for many federal programs, replacing employee-sponsored health insurance plans with individual tax credits, and imposing some serious controls on federal spending. You know, stuff that makes sense, which naturally makes Democrats run for the hills. Especially since Ryan’s plan does all that without raising taxes.
Ryan says that the time we live in now – where government growth continues unchecked, is “scary.” But of the Democrats, he says,”They just threw a bucket of cold water in the face of every voter. They woke us up out of our sleepwalk.”
And that’s the silver lining here, folks. Let’s face it. We needed that bucket of cold water. The sleepy giant has awoken, and he’s PISSED. Lots of us owe the energy we have and the passion we feel about our country right now to Democrats, for showing us exactly where we DON’T want to go.
WH Budget Director Peter Orszag concedes that Ryan’s proposals do address our country’s fiscal problems but criticizes the ideas for being a “dramatically different approach in which more risk is unloaded onto individuals rather than the government.” There’s a liberal for you – convinced people would rather be taken care of rather than take care of themselves. THIS is the problem with Democrats. Peter couldn’t have stated it any more clearly.
And Ryan gets criticism from his own party as well, from long-term congresspeople who get too timid to do big things like mess with Social Security and Medicare. But his response? “There are two kinds of people up here, be-ers and doers. There are a lot of people who come to Congress from both parties who just want to be a congressman. Keeping the job is the ultimate goal.”
It’s pretty obvious which category Ryan falls into. He watched his own party lose its way over the past decade, and became fully engaged. “I call it the atrophy phase of the Republican Party,” he said. “We all got caught up into micro-legislating . . . fine-tuning tax bills and things like that. We lost sight of the bigger picture and tinkered around the edges.”
Ryan views the Tea Party movement as a sign that people are “…ready to be talked to like adults. They are ready to have these ideas presented to them, and they want to choose the path of American exceptionalism, not managed decline.”
YES. “American exceptionalism” – something Democrats either ignore, downplay, or in the worst cases, apologize for. “Managed decline” is the perfect way to describe the path that Obama’s explosive government growth is leading us down.
Go, Paul Ryan, GO!
