Paul Ryan fantasizing about ending Social Security.
Rep. Paul Ryan, about to become a Serious Person again because of renewed congressional budget talks, concedes that there will be
no grand bargain coming out of these talks. But he doesn't seem to understand that whole "grand bargain" concept, because he seems to still have Social Security and Medicare in his sights.
"If we focus on some big, grand bargain then we're going to focus on our differences, and both sides are going to require that the other side compromises some core principle and then we'll get nothing done," Ryan, who chairs the House Budget Committee, said in an interview Thursday. "So we aren't focusing on a grand bargain because I don't think in this divided government you'll get one." [...]
The talks, he said, also will focus on alleviating another upcoming round of automatic spending cuts and replacing them with longer-term cuts.
Sequestration mostly hits so-called discretionary spending, the money approved by Congress each year to run agency operations. Ryan wants to cut autopilot-like spending on entitlement programs like Medicare to ease sequestration's effects on both the Pentagon and domestic programs.
"I think we all agree that there's a smarter way to cut spending" than sequestration, Ryan said. "If I can reform entitlement programs where the savings compound annually ... that is more valuable for reducing the debt than a one-time spending cut in discretionary spending."
Ryan apparently hasn't been paying attention to the words coming out of Harry Reid's mouth for the past week. Reid has said, clear as can be,
there won't be a trade of entitlements for sequester relief. More likely, Ryan's trying to move the goal posts, pretending that big structural changes to Social Security and Medicare were what were on the table in the grand bargain talks, instead of what was really there: Chained CPI, raising the eligibility age or means testing. Ryan is trying to take those grand bargain offers and pretend that they're a smaller, more reasonable ask in these new negotiations.
So he's trying to take a new hostage. The only way out of the sequester is sacrificing Social Security and Medicare. It would be a refreshing change from Obamacare as a hostage, if it wasn't so predictable.