Kudos To Paul Ryan And The GOP For Acknowledging Our Budget Mess

The government spending cap isn't a bad idea. Under Clinton it was about 18% and then of course it went up to 23% under GWB and 24% under Obama. I'd add the caveat though that it should increase in down cycles and decrease in up cycles. So when the economy is humming it should decrease to(ward) some predetermined floor and when the economy sputters it should increase. The overall average could be 20% or whatever the big brained number crunches decide is an appropriate target.

Are they afraid to cut military spending and bring home the troops because there are no jobs? Is that the giant elephant in the halls of Congress?

none of these politicians has a clue what they are doing. they are just reacting to lobbyists money

Budget deficits and debt cannot be solved without cutting defence, medicare, medicaid and welfare funding. Even if they cut 500 billion a year, it takes another 28 years to solve the debt problem.

And the Democrat alternative, to leave things just as they are? That's a road to ruin.

gotta love the bullsh#t that they include in a budget plan! how is stopping to fund abortions in DC going to have any impact on the budget???

they give tax breaks to millionaires (which they want to make permanent) yet they fire teachers. nice job repubs.

The cuts only look massive because we've had massive increases in spending. Simply go back to 2006 levels of spending and the budget balances in a few short years.

Remember when the Democrats said 2006 levels of spending were "outrageous" and "unsustainable"? Now suddenly those same levels of spending are "draconian cuts" that are so bad even the dead will suffer. :P

Kill medicare, medicaid and social security -- socialist plans anyway. Institute those death panels we heard so much about, especially for old nutjob republicans. Close the public schools. That should take care of the deficit, and leave money left over for fat contracts for General Dynamics, and big raises at the pentagon.

It'll be interesting: when 95% of the populace is living in poverty, will they then start to vote in their own best interest? Or will they keep blabbering "socialism bad, tax breaks for the wealthy good?"

The GOP cant fix 14 trillion and continue to not tax the rich! These politicans can talk all they want. they can act like they know what they are doing. But there is no way to fix 14 trillion! You can say that you can do it, then you can come up with a plan. The very next year you will find a way to spend billions policing the world. Inflation will hit us very soon and there will be no way to fix what we have let our politicans do. We will continue as a nation, but we will have to over haul almost everything that we do. The soviet union did it trying to keep up with us, now we have to pay the piper for spending money like we could afford everything.

Republicans plan to turn Medicare into vouchers and then funnel the money to the pockets of private insurers. Medicaid and Food Stamps become block grants so states can ignore the poor. Meanwhile money for schools, roads, and the nation's rotting infrastructure will be cut - DRASTICALLY. Not yet in the budget, but Republicans are also planning to "save Social Security" by converting it to accounts managed by Wall Street.

But it's NOT all bad -- while YOU suffer -- the rich get MORE tax cuts.

This plan, though far from perfect, is at least a start that approaches the magnitude of cuts we need to make. After we get over the "sticker shock" for the sheer size of the plan, we might be able to consider how to rearrange the plan without gutting it and how to keep the necessary magnitude but reach agreement on where to make the cuts. This is the first publicly announced plan that approaches the magnitude of our problem with a solution of like magnitude. For that reason alone, it and its author deserve our respect and thanks.

This writer is an incredible fool, a scoundrel, or both. Ryan and Co. cut off funding sources by putting the fix in for our wealthiest citizens and then they complain there's not enough money. It's a policy that kills our future. They starve education, health, and social services and are rapidly turning us into a banana republic run in behalf of the plantation owners.

Where Was Paul Ryan when this mess first began? This just didn't happen in the last two years. Instead of complaining and pointing fingers all of you should be coming together to find a common solution,that would help people survive in this day and age. But the rich want to keep getting richer while the poor keep getting poorer.

What lightweight nonsense. The Republicans are deeply unserious about cutting the deficit. They are still the party whose guiding philosophy is, as Dick Cheney told Paul O'Neill, "Reagan was right. Deficits don't matter". No kudos are deserved for Ryan and Co. He cuts spending, two thirds on the backs of poor people, and cuts taxes, mainly, yet again,for the rich. We need medical cost containment, medical cost containment, medical cost containment, (so-called Obamacare is a good first step and would have been better if the Republicans had engaged), major scale backs on defense and taxes raised back to the levels of the prosperous years of the Clinton Presidency, when we were on the way to reducing the deficit.

The budget problem can be expressed in one word - DEFENSE.

One half of our taxes go to this complete waste of money. That is the truth everyone fails to acknowledge. It is not pensions or public employee wages. It is not Medicare or Social Security. It is money wasted on bombs, boats and planes we could do very well without along with over 1,000 overseas military installations. Now that is just crazy.

OBAMA LIES: BALANCE THE BUDGET.....BRING THE TROOPS HOME....CLOSE GITMO.....REDUCE HEALTHCARE COST BY ADDING 135 MILLION MORE TO IT....WHAT A PACK OF LIES....RYAN FOR PRESIDENT IN 2012 !!!!!!!

I was Republican in the past, however I can not ethically ever be a Republican again. Kudos to Paul Ryan the most useless Representative alive. Give me a break.

This is what Republican Paul Ryan is proposing as a legitimate "budget rider" and why democrats won't go with these ridiculous "riders"

They want to eliminate Medicare completely and give everyone $5,000 to buy health care on the open market

The average person on SS Income is making $19,000 year for income. How do you think that will work?

Retirees on Medicare will be spending more than 50% of their money on medical cost or will not be able to afford any medical care at all.

The elected officials all knew the baby boomers were coming all 92 million of us. Do they think we will just sit on our hands and do nothing after paying all our lives for SS. I think not. In 2012 the republicans will see just how powerful we are when we vote as a block.

Cut the 1 trillion proposed defense budget for 2012 to 500 billion and put these wars back on the books and account for the spending. The republicans can keep trotting out this nonsense to protect their rich friends or they can get real and start fixing the mess they created right along with the Dem���s.

I believe the individual millionaires, the CEO's of these big companies, should be paying more tax, instead of getting tax breaks . (not speaking of corporations- they need to be handled separately)

Did you know many of the biggest corporation���s like GE, Bank of America, and most of the Oil companies, not only pay zero income tax, Additionally they get huge income tax credits from our federal government when they file their taxes. As you know these same banks like Bank of America, and institutions considered to have banking interests, like GE, and GMAC received huge bail-out money and Tarp money from us as well , the U.S. taxpayers. Yet republicans believe they should have no "responsibility" to the American citizens what so ever ?

Now, with all the huge profits from their businesses these corporations get, which they "supposedly earned" from selling to United States consumers, and with our Income Tax Credits to these same businesses, and Zero income tax (because they base themselves in other countries) Republicans now believe they need to take away any and all benefits (income to public employees , public assistance for low income people), there-by shifting the burden of all public and community services to our country's lowest and middle income people..... Rather than getting additional income from the "disgustingly rich" people of this country to help support the very people they are ripping off and getting rich off of.

Additionally, I will never buy General Motors vehicles again either. After taking their billions of taxpayer's money, they used that money to build employment and plants in China and other overseas nations. How is that an American company? ( I used to sell GM cars as a salesperson)

PS: Greg you have been drinking the kool aid way to long. Open your eyes and look at what is happening and who is being punished so the rich can have their tax breaks. If the rich don���t want to pay their fair share then they should denounce their US citizenship and get out before they are thrown out.

But Ryan and the Republicans deserve a lot of credit for at least acknowledging the huge fiscal mess the United States is in and proposing specific long-term remedies for dealing with it.Nonsense, Blodget. Those GOP clowns didn't give a hoot about the debt when they were running it up with wars for the rich, tax cuts for the rich, and deregulation for the rich.

Now they propose to pay for it all with trillions in further cuts for the rich and cuts in services for everyone else.

It's disgraceful. Our major problem is unemployment, not the debt. You're just echoing the blather of well-paid, inside the Beltway talking heads. In other words, lying idiots.
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Who was the last Republican president to balance the budget?

Eisenhawer

Yes, let's admire Paul Ryan's balls...