Proud of the Ryan Pick

I am just so dog-gone proud of the choice of Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan to be the vice presidential candidate on the Republican ticket.

Yes, I am proud as a fellow Cheesehead, having grown up in Wisconsin (and, like Rep. Ryan, a diehard fan of the Green Bay Packers).

And, yes, I am proud as a Catholic to see (at long last) a Catholic on a major party ticket who respects human life and is not a cheerleader for the abortion industry.  And, given that stewardship is one of our responsibilities as Catholics, I am pleased to see a political leader who rightly is worried about the suffocating federal debt that we are leaving to the next generation.

Most importantly, I am proud as a Republican to see Governor Romney make a principled choice of a man of substance, rather based on political calculations about appealing to this or that constituency or carrying this or that battleground state.

With Rep. Ryan on the Republican ticket, perhaps we can now have an adult conversation for a change in American politics.  I appreciate that others on the Mirror of Justice and elsewhere, not least including the American Catholic bishops, have serious reservations about many of his specific budgetary proposals.  Whatever one’s views about Rep. Ryan's proposals, this nomination now reframes the presidential election into one about ideas. 

Paul Ryan has long been one of the few leaders in public life with the courage to address the tough budgetary and entitlement issues and not try to duck them until after the next election or pass them on to the next generation.  The greatest threat our nation faces is the growing national debt, with deficits quadrupled during President Obama's first year in office, with a first-ever downgrading of the nation’s credit rating, with a failure of the Democratic Senate to even consider a budget, and with the national debt consuming ever larger portions of the national economy.  Without a concerted and immediate reduction in the national debt, we will be guilty of strangling opportunity for the next generation.

Democratic politicians avoid the national debt issue by pretending that President Obama’s ongoing record federal spending levels -– now reaching the levels of World War II –- can be sustained by raising taxes on the wealthy.  The richest are already paying most of the federal income tax -– the top ten percent of earners pay 70 percent of federal income taxes -- while 45 percent of Americans pay no income tax at all.  And the United States has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world.

And Republican politicians avoid the national debt issue by pretending that cutting wasteful spending will balance the budget, without the need to make any difficult decisions.  But reductions in discretionary spending alone will make only a small dent, unless we give simultaneous attention to the massive size of entitlements,

Rep. Paul Ryan has been the grown-up in the room and forthrightly tells us that we cannot reduce the bloated national debt and put the economy back on an even keel without entitlement reform.  Democrats can always be expected to demagogue Social Security and Medicare reform, saying that Republicans want to push grandma’s wheel-chair off the cliff (as in the infamous liberal campaign ad from last year) (here).  In the face of real and anticipated Democratic attacks, Republicans then lose their nerve and fail to tackle the issue when they are in power.  And so it goes.

Whether you agree with every aspect of it or not, Paul Ryan’s budget doesn’t pull the punches or dodge the problem.  He forthrightly calls for entitlement reform that would preserve Medicare as it is for all those 55 and over and institute the necessary reforms to save it for the future.

According to the Bipartisan Policy Center (here), even under his own assumptions, President Obama’s budget would do little to lower the national debt over the next ten years (and the BPC assumes the most plausible scenario is that the debt will rise upward toward 90 percent of GDP).  Rep. Ryan’s budget would stabilize the national debt at about 60 percent of GDP within ten years.  (And, contrary to my colleague, Rob Vischer’s post, Ryan has not proposed “massive tax cuts for the wealthy,” but rather has proposed reducing tax rates while simultaneously simplifying the complicated tax code and closing loopholes for the wealthy.  We can debate whether the economic assumptions for revenue neutrality are correct, but the design is not to reduce revenues or shift tax burdens from the wealthy to the middle-class.)

Are Ryan’s proposal the right ones or the best ones?  Well, that’s the debate.  But it’s a debate we should have.  Let’s not slide past the most important economic issues for yet another election cycle and kick the can down the road once more.  By choosing Ryan, Governor Romney has asked for a great national discussion about our national debt.  It’s about time!