Paul Ryan: #AskTheGreeks How Not Dealing With Your Debt Works Out
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan appeared CNBC's The Kudlow Report on Valentine's Day, 2012.
This is really more of a campaign document than a credible fiscal solution to our big budget problems. Look, the President is claiming that this is a $4 trillion deficit reduction package; but when you strip out all the accounting tricks and all the budget gimmicks, he's increasing spending by 1.5 trillion and increasing taxes by 1.9 trillion for a measly $400 billion of deficit reduction over a 10-year period, where he proposes to spend $47 trillion. So under the status quo, with the debt expected to rise 78 percent under this budget, it rises 76 percent.
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The problem we have is at this moment in our history we're on the verge of our own debt crisis. This is when we need leadership and it's when we can least afford to have a President who is just walking away from this. It's the fourth year of trillion dollar-plus deficits with the president's fourth budget, and that's why we say it's just not serious.
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Every time you don't do something to fix this problem, it just gets that much worse. Ask the Greeks. And so what we're going to do, Larry, is we're going to actually propose and pass a budget again. I know that sounds novel these days, but we have a law that says we have to pass a budget by April 15th. The Senate has ignored that law for 2010. They ignored it in 2011. Now they say they're going to ignore it again in 2012. We're not because we think it's our moral and legal obligation to pass a budget. We're going to pass a budget to get these entitlements under control, to get this debt under control, to keep our debt from getting at these catastrophic levels. And we're going to propose fundamental tax reform, broaden the base, lower the rates.
What Ron Wyden and I were trying to do, we are trying to show that there is--there is room for a bipartisan consensus on how to save and shrink the Medicare, how to--how to keep the guarantee for current seniors and have a program that younger people can actually rely on. Because right now Medicare is making 37 trillion in empty promises to current and future seniors, and the president's law puts this new sort of rationing board in charge of putting price controls on Medicare, which leads to denied care. In his budget, his only other spending cut really of significance is just more Medicare rationing, just another half a percentage point by his board for them to decide how to twist the screws on Medicare. We're going to reject that. And we believe that there's a bipartisan consensus emerging here on how to save and strengthen Medicare.
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We have put out specifics on spending cuts, on entitlement reforms and tax reforms. The Senate, they're not budgeting. They didn't budget two years ago, a year ago. They're not budgeting this year. And the president for the fourth year in a row gave us trillion dollar deficit budget and a budget that literally does not propose to do anything to fix this fiscal crisis, save these entitlement programs and prevent a debt crisis. And that, to me, is a huge abdication of leadership at a moment in our country's history when we need it so badly.
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We want an upward mobility society. We don't want a safety net that turns into a hammock that lulls people into dependency in this country. We want people to get up on their feet and grab that higher rung of the economic ladder. We believe in upward mobility. We don't believe in class division. We believe in growth and prosperity, helping people when they are down on their luck get back on their feet, and pro-growth economic policies that put America in the lead, that make us competitive, that stop tearing people down in this zero-sum thinking. We reject it.