Will Congress Buy Ryan's No Nonsense Budget?

Paul Ryan, House Budget Committee Chairman and realist, has taken the great leap.  He has publicly proposed a budget resolution for Fiscal Year 2012 that directly takes on Medicare and Medicaid, the two great drivers of the impending American debt crisis.

Ryan’s become the first elected federal official with any position of responsibility who’s decided to break the cone of silence surrounding the ugly and simple truth—you cannot put the United States back on a sound fiscal track unless you admit that the government has made promises that it cannot keep.

Some have already criticized the Ryan Plan: it doesn’t address tax increases; it hits the elderly; it breaks promises we have made to those who pay the payroll tax; it’s unrealistic.

Shortly after Ryan released his budget plan, the President and Republican leaders met at the White House.  Ostensibly the meeting was about the seventh Continuing Resolution for FY11 appropriations.  The meeting though really foreshadows the larger questions that will surround the FY12 budget and the upcoming attempt by Congress to raise the federal debt limit.

And, no deal emerged from that meeting.  Indeed, only snide remarks and political posturing made news.  But, sorrowfully, no one expected much more.

We have talked before about the difficult challenge House Speaker Boehner has before him—trying to get Republicans of “form” to agree with Republicans of substance.  So far, the Michelle Bachmanns of the world have garnered most of the momentum—that is, from the Republicans for political advantage and “form.”  Now Ryan has spoken for Republicans of substance—that is, Republicans for serious fiscal reform.

So far, Ryan is a courageous but lonely figure.  No one knows if he has the votes to pass his plan out of his own committee.  No one knows what will happen to the plan on the House floor -- if it gets there.  And certainly the Senate would reject the initiative if forced to vote on it anytime soon.

Will anybody else leap in with Ryan?  That question must occupy the thinking of Speaker Boehner as he tries to thread his way through the theologists and ideologues of his party.  He knows that he will get no help from the Nancy Pelosi wing of the Democratic Party.  Indeed, Pelosi and the political people in the White House must be delighted tonight as they begin to devise their 30-second commercials to use against Ryan and his supporters.

Only when the far left and far right are defeated on an important vote will the center of Congressional politics emerge and rule.

So, Boehner still faces fundamental challenge.  Will he side entirely with his ideological purists in the House GOP caucus, or will he begin real discussions with moderate and conservative Democrats in the House in order to get fundamental fiscal restraint?  Time remains for the Speaker to make his decision.  But, as the debt limit battle nears, Boehner has much difficult work to do.

Meanwhile, deficit projections worsen and warnings about debt increase.

Soon the United States will join some other notables in the world with deficits at 10% of gross domestic product and a debt limit that approximates 100% of GDP.  Those other notables?  Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Spain, among developed nations.

In a whimsical comment, someone asked me recently if I spoke Greek.  I said no.  He said I ought to learn soon since we are following the fiscal path Greece has forged.

We better hope that it remains a whimsical notion.

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