Not Radical Enough

By Bill Wilson
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich poured gasoline on his presidential campaign and lit the match when he attacked House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s Medicare proposals as “imposing radical change from the right” on NBC’s Meet the Press.
Americans for Limited Government (ALG) Chairman Howard Rich wrote in response that Gingrich’s comments had “sparked a full-fledged uproar — not only among Republican voters who support the Ryan plan, but also among fiscal conservatives who know the Ryan plan doesn’t do enough to address entitlement spending, the root of our nation’s fiscal implosion.”

In other words, the plan was not too radical — it was not radical enough. It would have been one thing if Gingrich was saying the proposal could have done more, but in this case, he was saying that it goes too far.
So, let’s look at it. The House proposal won’t balance the budget any time soon — it will take 26 years. By Chairman Ryan’s own numbers, the proposal will add more than $8 trillion to the gross national debt over 10 years.

It does not address Standard & Poor’s recent downgrade of its outlook on U.S. debt from “stable” to “negative,” the threat that a full downgrade of the nation’s Triple-A credit rating is substantially more likely in the next two years.

That’s because S&P did not shift its outlook until April 18 — after the Ryan budget was already passed by the House on April 15.
Get full story here.