Paul Ryan interview

[Valin]

Hugh Hewitt Show:

1/5/11

(Snip)

HH: But the Budget committee’s going to have to lead that, and it’s going to have to be brutal. Do you think it’s prepared to do that?

PR: Yeah, I mean, I personally don’t call this brutal. What’s brutal is doing nothing, and just watching us go off a cliff. What’s brutal is procrastinate budget reforms, entitlements reforms, and then to the painful European austerity, where we just manage our decline as a social welfare state for the rest of the century. That’s what’s brutal. What makes sense, but we’ve got to get the politics right to do this, is let’s do budget reform, fiscal reform on our own terms. Let’s do it our own way before we have a debt crisis, without tax increases, without slowing down our economy, and without giving pain and cuts to current seniors who’ve already retired. If you go now or in the near future, you can prevent severe disruptions in the lives of people who’ve already retired and organized their lives around these programs like Medicare and Social Security. If you delay, you can’t keep making that kind of a commitment. So if you go now, you can grandfather the grandparents, reform these programs for the future generations so they’re more sustainable, more solvent, so we can keep our government limited, so we can maximize economic growth, prosperity and free enterprise. You can maintain that, that limited government, free enterprise, free market democracy, which is what we’ve had in this country, if you fix this stuff fast. But again, if you procrastinate, you’re not going to have that. You’re going to have a government that will be twice as big as it is today when my kids are my age. You’ll have a tax burden that will be twice as large as it is, per person, per capita, as a percentage of our GDP, when my kids are our age. We will slow down the economy, and we will give the next generation a far lower standard of living. And the American exceptionalism will be a thing of the past.

HH: All right, I want to go through each of those areas with you. We’ve got 25 minutes to do that. But let’s start with the actual tall weeds of the process. What’s the Budget committee going to do to start moving toward, away from the cliff, not towards the cliff, but away from the cliff?
(Snip)