Roadmap Rules

[Geee]

Weekly Standard:

The calls were unexpected. Early in 2010, Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, began receiving requests for information about the Roadmap for America’s Future, his ambitious plan to reform entitlements, taxes, and spending. Ryan, a Republican star, is no stranger to press inquiries. But these were coming from an unexpected source: Republican candidates for Congress who were looking for solutions—any solutions—to America’s fiscal crisis. Ryan estimates that he sent about 100 copies of the Roadmap to interested candidates. “We didn’t plan that,” he says.

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Nor did Ryan fully anticipate the left’s ferocious response to his suggestions. Almost as soon as the updated Roadmap was unveiled in January—the original version was released in 2008—Democrats and liberals pounced. The fusillade was aimed at the Roadmap’s most controversial aspect: an overhaul of entitlements for Americans under 55 years old that would introduce means-testing and optional personal accounts into Social Security, and transform Medicare into a defined-contribution voucher program. Ignoring the facts, Democrats tried to play the senior card, suggesting to anyone who’d listen that the Roadmap would “privatize” Social Security and “shred” the safety net. President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, House Democratic campaign chairman Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, dozens of Democratic incumbents, legions of liberal talking heads—they all claimed the Roadmap would hurt seniors. Paul Krugman of the New York Times went so far as to call Ryan “the flimflam man” and his good-faith proposal a “fraud.”