Ryan’s Brave Budget

[Geee]

National Review:


‘My worst experience was the financial crisis of September 2008,” responded House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan yesterday to a reporter’s question about Democrats’ attacks on the budget he unveiled earlier in the day.

“What if the president and your representative saw it coming and could have prevented it from happening?” Ryan said. “What would you think of them if they didn’t?” A hush came over the audience at the American Enterprise Institute (where I am a resident fellow).

It was Ryan’s way of saying that the financial meltdown arrived largely without warning, while the impending fiscal crunch is like a runaway freight train.
“This is the most predictable crisis in the history of our country,” he went on. “We are on our path to a debt crisis” like those we’ve seen recently in Europe, with the national debt as a percentage of gross domestic product rising, under Barack Obama’s budget, past the 90 percent danger point on its way to 800 percent.

At some point in between, as Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff explains in the Financial Times, interest rates spike upward and the government is forced to make draconian cuts.