I am glad that my piece has sparked a discussion around here, just as I am glad that Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap” has sparked a discussion among the broader commentariat. Just a couple of points in response.

Ramesh writes: “Many Republicans have complained that President Obama’s agenda is too ambitious: that it attempts to do too many things at once, indeed to transform America.” This is a resonant complaint. But what gives it its resonance, I think, is that Obama is seeking to transform America for no good reason. The difference between Obama’s overreach and Ryan’s is not just a difference in the directions in which they would take the country. It is primarily a difference between the severity of the problems they are attempting to address.

The high cost of health care is a problem for many individual Americans, but it is a problem for America because the program we use to pay for care for seniors is insolvent. Obama claims his health-care overhaul addresses this problem; I disagree. But more importantly, that’s not the point of the overhaul — universal coverage is — which is why, in the context of our disturbing budget picture, the “too ambitious” label sticks. Global warming strikes most Americans as even less of a concern — in fact, they literally think it’s the least of our worries — so Obama’s outsized attention to that issue also gave people the impression that he was more interested in transforming the country along ideological lines than in solving real problems.

The impossibility of our current commitments to retirees is, I think, a real problem, and plummeting revenues and exploding spending related to the financial crisis have made it more of a near-term problem than it was when George W. Bush attempted to reform Social Security. As I acknowledged in my piece, “voters have expressed a preference for less risk, not more control, when it comes to their post-retirement well-being.” But I gamely offered that “the nation’s problems are so great that it’s possible the calculus has changed.”

I’ll admit, it’s more likely that the calculus has not changed, and that Maggie’s reading of the political landscape is more accurate than mine. Public concern regarding the unsustainability of entitlements is not yet acute enough to provide political cover for anything as radical as what Ryan has proposed. But I fear that the day when events force our hand on this issue is nearer than many think. And if Republicans are going to become the “Party of Old People” in the way Maggie suggests, then they are also going to have to become the party of much higher taxes on the middle class. There’s no other way to make the math work.