Natalie Gonnella
As the GOP prepares to unveil their 2012 budget on Tuesday, House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan sat down with Chris Wallace to discuss the key elements of the proposal.
With a dramatic focus on spending cuts and entitlement reform which aim to cut more than $4 trillion in expenditure, here's a look at what Ryan had to say about the key objectives of the Republicans' forthcoming plan:
On spending:
Right now we're at about 25 percent of GDP. The president's budget keeps us on a huge trajectory where we are at, about 23, 24 percent of GDP. He never gets even close to balancing the budget. He never even gets close to doing what he calls primary balance. So the metrics that he put out for the fiscal commission are not even being met.
We're going to exceed the goals in the fiscal commission. We're going to put out a budget that gets us on a path to not only balancing the budget, but gets us on a path of paying off the debt.
On taxes:
We don't have a tax problem. The problem with our deficit is not because Americans are taxed too little. The problem with the deficit is because Washington spends too much money. We have got to stop spending money we don't have.
So we're not going to go down the path of raising taxes on people and raising taxes on the economy. We want to go after the source of the problem, and that is spending. So yes, we want pro-growth job reform for job creation, for economic growth, not for tax increasing. We'll go after spending
On Medicare reform:
Our reforms are along the line of what I proposed with Alice Rivlin, the Democrat from the Clinton administration in the fiscal commission, which is a premium support system. That's very different from a voucher.
Premium support is exactly the system I as a member of Congress and all federal employees have. It works like the Medicare prescription drug benefit, similar to Medicare Advantage today, which means Medicare puts a list of plans out there that compete against each other for your business, and seniors pick the plan of their choosing, and then Medicare subsidizes that plan. It doesn't go to the person, into the marketplace. It goes to the plan. More for the poor, more for people who get sick, and we don't give as much money to people who are wealthy.
Doing that saves Medicare. It doesn't apply to anybody. Those who are 55 or above keep their Medicare exactly as is it today, but the problem is the biggest driver of our debt is Medicare. It has trillions, tens of trillions of dollars of unpaid promises.
...[W]e want to fulfill the mission of health retirement security for future seniors, and so we will be proposing a premium support system like the Rivlin-Ryan plan, which is identical to the system I as a member of Congress and all federal employees have.
On Medicaid reform:
We've had so much testimony from so many different governors saying give us the freedom to customize our Medicaid programs, to tailor for our unique populations in our states. We want to get governors freedom to do that
On the GOP's budget and the 2012 election:
We are giving [the Democrats] a political weapon to go against us, but they will have to lie and demagogue to make that a political weapon.
Look, we don't change benefits for anybody over the age of 55. We save Medicare, save Medicaid. We save these entitlement programs. We repair our social safety net, and we get our country a debt-free country for our children and grandchildren's generation. And we get jobs. We get economic growth.
They are going to demagogue us, and -- and it's that demagoguery that has always prevented political leaders in the past from actually trying to fix the problem. We can't keep kicking this can down the road.
The president has punted. We're not going to follow suit. And, yes, we will be giving our political adversaries things to use against us in the next election, and shame on them if they do that.
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