Townhall
Finance…
Paul
Ryan's
Old-Fashioned American Vision
By Larry
Kudlow
When you think of
Republican congressman Paul Ryan, terms like
earnest, serious, and important come to mind. So does the term
old-fashioned.
Ryan comes from an old-fashioned place, the blue-collar town of
Janesville,
Wisconsin. He cherishes the old-fashioned values of a faithful family
man. He
even looks old-fashioned, with his white shirts and striped ties. And
he uses
old-fashioned argument skills, persuasively weaving big-picture themes
with the
numbers that back them up.
And Ryan has
old-fashioned goals, too, like saving America from
fiscal bankruptcy, economic stagnation, and a European-style
entitlement state.
“Just look at what
happened across the Atlantic,” Ryan told me in
a year-end interview. “We have to avoid that. We must reclaim our
founding
principles of economic freedom and free markets. We must preserve the
American
Idea.”
With this vision, and
with a pro-growth budget framework called “A
Roadmap for America’s Future,” Ryan’s serious ideas have seriously
gotten under
President Obama’s skin.
In a White House
meeting this year, Ryan’s superior knowledge of
health care baffled Obama and left him speechless. And the serious Ryan
budget,
which lowers spending by $6.2 trillion and reduces deficits by $4.4
trillion
over ten years, totally outflanked the White House. It embarrassingly
exposed
the Obama administration’s flimsy and inconsequential 2012 budget,
which even
rejected the findings of Obama’s own Bowles-Simpson fiscal commission.
(Another
Oval Office embarrassment.)
And when Ryan
unveiled his first Medicare-reform package, which
featured patient-centered consumerchoice and market competition, the
White
House went nuts. Team Obama whipped up a Mediscare panic, resorting to
a
fictional caricature of Ryan forcing old ladies off a cliff. But the
charge
that the Ryan plan “ends Medicare” couldn’t be further from the truth
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