Is Paul Ryan crazy, or the only honest Republican?
Strip away the libertarian veneer, and many Tea Partiers have one main message - don't mess with my medicare or medicaid. And nobody wants to - the cuts that Obama suggested while trying to give coverage to forgotten tax payers who pay taxes that eventually support medicare and medicaid but can't afford coverage themselves were pretty small. So what could justify the sort of cuts Paul Ryan claims to want to talk about (we'll see what he says when the Tea Party people want their Tea a lot sweeter)?
Well, imagine Greece and several other European nations default. Then people will start worrying seriously about Great Britain. Now imagine people start selling British bonds, until they either have to create a lot of cash or default. Now the unimaginable is imaginable - people could start selling American treasury bonds. China and Japan might have to get on the bandwagon or be run over.
That would be a different world - one hard to imagine now. The days of cut and spend Republicanism would truly be over. We would truly be forced to face that fact that every dollar we spent on one thing is a dollar we don't spend on something else.
If Republican Paul Ryan can face this future, so can we. Of course he hasn't quite, hasn't acknowledged that sooner rather than later insurance companies would decide certain treatments were not cost effective. He hasn't told the Tea Party people in his state, 'I don't represent you, I'm your worst nightmare if you want to talk about small government without touching medicare'. But he's taken a baby step. Put down the Tea and back away slowly.
Are we really that desperate, to look at cuts bigger than Obama's (privatised since so many want to have their Tea and drink it too) without even expanding coverage? We may be in a year or so.