Here is House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) explaining the nature of the debt crisis in the United States, on Fox News with Mike Huckabee:
Huckabee: “What does this debt mean to America’s future?”
Ryan: “It means we have a diminished country. It means for the first time ever in the history of this country, we will give our children and our grandchildren a lower standard of living… we will sever the legacy of leaving our children better on. And all of this deficit and debt today actually slows down our economy… because every time we have these big deficits like we have now, that simply means big tax increases and big interest rate increases tomorrow… So it’s not just damaging the future for our children, it damages the economy today.”
As Ryan points out, the Congressional Budget Office’s own computer simulation model predicts that if nothing is done, our debt “actually, literally crashes our economy” in 2037.
What’s causing our debt problem?
Ryan: “The reason we have all this debt is because too many politicians have been making empty promises to Americans about all of this borrowing and spending, and this is going to catch up with us. The question is: Will we get honest leadership and fact-based budgeting, stop the accounting gimmicks and all the fiscal sleight of hand and actually address this issue, fix this crisis before it really gets out of hand and out of our control?”
Exactly much have politicians over-promised?
Ryan: “The Government Acocuntability Office tells us we have about $88.6 trillion of unfunded liabilities. That means we are $88.6 trillion short of being able to fulfill government’s promises that are being made to everybody in America today.”
The biggest drivers of that deficit — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security (in that order) — are projected to ultimately consume 100 percent of tax revenue within the next 30 years. Absent meaningful reform, our entitlement programs are simply unsustainable.
Ryan explains: “We’re going from 40 million retirees in America to 77 million retirees in America. And these are pay-as-you go programs — current workers pay current taxes for current beneficiaries. So when you have a 100 percent increase, virtually, in beneficiaries, but only a 17 percent increase in workers paying into those programs , that’s part of the problem.”
A problem that is getting worse to the tune of $10 trillion per year. That is why Republicans plan to step up and lead on the issue, by releasing a 2012 budget that includes meaningful reform to entitlement programs. President Obama, on the other, has decided to sit on the sidelines and issue languid proclamations about the need for a “conversation” about entitlements, after completely ignoring the recommendations of the bipartisan deficit commission that he appointed to do just that.
The importance of acting now, Ryan says, is to ensure that current and near-retirees will not be affected. If we wait any longer, that won’t be the case. Deep and sudden cuts will be imposed on us the way they were imposed on countries like Greece.
Ryan: “If you’ve already retired or you’re about to retire and you’ve organized your lives around Medicare and Social Security, what we will do is preserve those benefits for you just like they are today and then reform them for future generations so that they can actually rely on them, because they are going bankrupt… If we do it now, we do it on our terms, meaning we don’t change anything for people in and near retirement. But if we wait, if we keep delaying and kicking the can down the road, then it will look like Europe — bitter austerity. Cuts will happen to current seniors, and that’s what we want to avoid.”
Ryan is on a mission now to educate not only the American public, but also Republican lawmakers, particularly freshmen, as to the size and scope of the debt problem and how to go about solving it, and perhaps more critically, how to sell those solutions to their constituents. To that end, he has been conducting “listening sessions” with House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) and Deputy Whip Peter Roskam (R., Ill.), which I wrote about here.
To see the slides Ryan uses in his presentations, go here.
And there’s plenty more here.
Still the fiction about the recommendations of the bipartisan commission? What recommendations were those? The ones that didn't get enough votes to trigger a vote in Congress? The recommendations that Ryan voted against?
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse2037?
Every boomer looks at that and says, "Pfft...I'll be dead by that point."
The gimme guys and gals of the worst generation plan to take it all with them and leave us with the bill.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseHuckabee/Ryan 2012!
Both are not afraid to address the issues facing our country.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseZman obviously is very young, doesn't remember his Mom and Dad or he was obused by them.
It is the "worst" generation who will stop this train wreck named Obama.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThank goodness for Paul Ryan. How is it that the same state could produce both him and the self-indulgent whiners who are still protesting in Madison?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseOk, the patient is morbidly obese as a result of an irresponsible diet over the past 10 years; now the pushers who prescribed the diet (Republicans spending for wars and unfunded mandates and cutting taxes without any resulting job growth during the Bush years; Cheney saying "deficits don't matter") diagnose the problem and find fault with anyone who won't amputate both legs to get the patient down to the preferred weight immediately? A responsible fix to fiscal woes isn't going to happen over night and has to include tax increases. Spending cuts have to include defense and other entitlements intelligently considered; hitting some arbitrary number like $100 Billion this year to satisfy a campaign pledge is ludicrous. What happened to job creation?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI too am getting really tired of the way 'boomers' are lumped together as some monolithic bloc characterized as selfish and uncaring entitlement junkies when, in fact, the designation is totally arbitrary and merely statistical. Their only outstanding feature is numbers, hence the term 'boomers', from the 'baby boom' following WWII, but there the similarities end.
Those elected officials who enacted and have funded entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare - the former enacted ten years before the first boomer was born, the latter enacted when all boomers were still minor children - failed to keep them funded or reform them, kicking the proverbial can down the road, year after year, decade after decade. But it is the 'boomers' who are repeatedly denigrated by some for selfishness in prospectively bankrupting the system in the not so distant future. It is the 'boomers' on whom the ignorant place the blame.
I am a 'boomer', born in 1955, and had absolutely nothing to do with the enactment of Social Security or Medicare, nor have I had anything to do with their funding over the years, nor with the raiding of funds, beyond my personal recognition that reform has long been needed. I have planned financially for the possibility I'll never see a dime out of these entitlements, for which my every paycheck has been dunned since I began working fulltime in 1971 at age 16.
So please, Zmen of the world, explain to me how I, as a 'boomer', bear any responsibility whatsoever for the fiscal problems of Social Security and Medicare. Please explain where I've been selfish, or how it is selfish to expect a benefit I didn't ask for but have been forced to pay for over the 39 years I've been working and paying taxes.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseFrankly Ryan talks a lot but us see the action. By the way while he is talking about SS recipient's being the greedy ones let me say SS did not contribute one dime to the deficit greedy elitist did.
What he and his Republican friends better do is address the immediate problem of jobs. How about the corporate tax sir etc.
That job development will help produce revenue and a reduction in spending is the best way to begin to hit the deficit. The big spender is medicare which is wrought with fraud and inefficient policy and procedures but all these guys like Ryan have not done anything to address the fraud.
So far all I see is a lot of talk from this bunch
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseRyan is spot on with this. External Link
The roadmap not taken, if we do not have Republicans united on this we are doomed.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseOne of the biggest problems with getting people to understand the size of the debt issue is the simple fact that people have problems conceptualizing gigantic numbers.
People can grasp a million dollars, maybe even a billion these days but a trillion? Its hard to get a perspective on anything that large so trying to get people to understand how it might even begin to be managed is fundamentally complicated.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abusesoylent green, fact or fiction? you decide
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseHenry, et al,
You are responsible in that the politicians elected during your voting years are the people who screwed it up. Are you, personally, responsible? I have no idea (if you voted D or R, yes, you are).
Is it "fair"? Probably not, but who cares? "Fair" is irrelevant to reality.
Kevin, $100 Billion is a SMALL, arbitrary start. If we cannot get that far, we cannot make a real difference. If you don't like $100 Billion, then go up, not down. $200 Billion next year works for me, it's still a drop in the bucket, but it's a start.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIf you walk into your bathroom and see the tub overflowing with the faucet on full, what is the first thing you should do?
Turn the faucet off.
After that, you can begin the clean up, pull he plug, find out what went wrong.
Turn the faucet off.
Aside from the happy fact that the federal Congress has no authority to run an insurance Ponzi scheme, and that our Constitution should guide us in what few federal government functions we should retain, that is a question for another day.
Turn the faucet off.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"As Ryan points out, the Congressional Budget Office’s own computer simulation model predicts that if nothing is done, our debt “actually, literally crashes our economy” in 2037"
What a joke. So given that debt/GDP is projected to be $28 trillion in 2020, we'll magically sail along for another 17 years after that unaffected?
I think Paul Ryan needs to learn a thing about finance.
We're entering the crisis this very year; none of the structural problems in the U.S. economy have been fixed. We have a more highly-levered investment-banking system than 2008, $4T in damaged assets or quantitative easing on the Federal Reserve's balance sheet so far, trillions more in added sovereign debt, an ignorant and spoiled population unwilling to make sacrifice, and a woefully undercapitalized financial system supporting a heinous derivative structure. This state of affairs is ending now, and the pollyannaish estimates coming from Republicans are irresponsible.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWe are doomed because nobody will do the hard stuff...
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuseand if by some slim chance we find a person who will, they will be voted out by the gimmie gimmie crowd.
Don't quite know how the boomers are to blame for the demise of the Big Three Entitlement Programs, since virtually none of us have begun to draw the benefits and yet we know Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are already bankrupt.
Sounds to me like it's the "Greatest Generation" that has spent the money, while putting relatively little into the system. Most of them have been retired for decades.
Meanwhile, I've been paying through the nose into SSA and Medicare for those same decades.
And don't forget the freeloaders who figured a way to get on the dole and who, by definition, take but do not pay into it.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseRe: Kevin Moriarty ...
External Link
No job growth during the Bush years? I don't think so ... as seen in one of the graphs in the link above, jobs kept growing steadily ... you usually have to have job growth just to keep the unemployment rate steady, as it was during the Bush years ...
... that is, until job growth ABRUPTLY flattened out right around early 2007.
Looks to me like businesses then realized that the Dims now had the power to turn them into cash cows and social-services surrogates in the service of the Progressive State ... and responded by scaling back their activities, which continues to this day.
We were also headed back towards budget balance ... until the Dims took over Congress.
Re-, er, Progressive boilerplate talking points, like tax increases and bemoaning the war (think about how much just one 911-sized event did to our economy - consider those wars as preventive maintenance for our civilization, to prevent sequels to 911 from others) are not the answer ... especially not when there are binge eaters, fiscally speaking, running the show in the Senate and White House. We've seen that show before.
No, the answer is to limit the federal government to managing the few one-size-fits-all areas it is suited for, instead of using it as the vehicle for the Re-, er, Progressive Best and Brightest to impose their "wisdom" upon us all, secure in their own delusions of omniscience.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSocial Security is a Ponzi scheme. The government involuntarily deducts a percentage from your pre tax income which your employer matches. The money is placed in an account until you reach retirement age. At that point, Social Security Administration divides the principal by the number of months you have left. That is your monthly social security check. The government has had an interest free loan of an ever increasing balance. When I retired, my account contained a six figure balance on which I had already paid federal and state income tax for 48 years. If I die before 77, they keep the money.
Of course, the government knew it was a Ponzi scheme, so as Carlo Ponzi did, they used new contributors' money to pay retired contributors' benefits. Any cash flow in excess of payouts was considered "surplus," which the government spent. Do not blame a generation, blame the Federal Government.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"By the way while he is talking about SS recipient's being the greedy ones let me say SS did not contribute one dime to the deficit greedy elitist did."
First, this is incoherent. Maybe this is one of the people who think there is something besides promises in the Social Security "lock box."
Trying to explain economic principles to idiots like this is half the problem.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIt's true that all baby boomers are responsible for this mess. They want it all and they want to take it with them, and they will stick their children with the bill. All true. They are the WORST. GENERATION. EVER. Spoiled rotten, full of a sense of entitlement. You see them marching in Madison, Wisconsin as we speak - marching for other peoples' money, which they will explain to you, using their ignorant grasp of economics, that they deserve, because other people have more than them. Their spokesperson is an ignorant fat slob called Michael Moore mouthing thievery as public policy. They want more, they want it all, and they want it now. And they think they deserve it.
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