Congressman Paul Ryan, now the VP candidate in this year’s presidential election, made a stop in Colorado yesterday, holding a rally at Lakewood High School west of Denver. I dragged my two kids to the event, mainly so they can say they saw President Ryan (some day, I hope) in person.
The addition of Paul Ryan to the ticket elevates the political conversation in America. The problem is that the left refuses to discuss the coming fiscal implosion and will instead distract and deny.
If you haven’t already guessed, I’m a huge fan of the Congressman from Wisconsin. Despite what rich, pampered celebrities and other media elites may spew about Ryan, he’s not throwing granny off the cliff and yanking the entitlement rug from underneath her (Help! I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!).
First, let’s dispel this myth once and for all… Ryan’s plan does not affect Medicare for anyone over the age of 55, so if you’re a senior citizen, relax. However, for those under 55, listen up… If you don’t elect the Romney-Ryan ticket this November, you’re screwed.
Medicare alone represents more than $25 trillion in unfunded liabilities. That’s a T with a Rillion behind it. Can you even fathom that much debt? To put it another way, that’s somewhere in the neighborhood of almost $200,000 in government debt per household for one freaking program. As Ryan pointed out at the rally: “[Obama] promised to cut the deficit in half in four years. I rest my case on that one.”
So, while seniors are played for fools and told to stuff entitlements under their proverbial mattresses, all of us, including our children and grandchildren, will likely never see a penny of these entitlements when we reach 65, unless something changes.
This is the great irony of progressivism; it is not at all progressive. Social Security was enacted in 1935; Medicare in 1965. Despite the fact that the demographics since both were signed into law have changed radically, Democrats hang onto these outdated programs with a death grip, refusing to reform them, thus dooming future generations to pay into a system that will never pay them back.
It’s simple mathematics, but apparently a lot of people suck at math. That’s no excuse and it’s time to wake up to reality. That reality is that the biggest financial bubble in the history of the world is headed our way. Our current spending path takes us down a road I care not to travel.
According to the International Monetary Fund, U.S. debt as a share of the economy in 2011 was 100 percent. In Greece, it was 152 percent. By 2040, U.S. debt as a share of the economy, at its present rate, will be near 300 percent. In other words, there won’t be a 2040 for America.
When Greece crashes, it’s a problem, but it can be dealt with. When the U.S. crashes, watch out. It won’t be pretty, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to stand by idly and watch it happen to my older self and future generations, not to mention what the coming financial implosion will mean to the rest of the world.
Then along comes Paul Ryan, who proposes entitlement reform and spending cuts to back us away from the cliff we’re speeding toward. As Ryan said at the rally yesterday, “We are mortgaging our future. We have to stop spending money we don’t have and leave our children a debt-free nation.”
But it’s obvious that a lot of people don’t care if we’re mortgaging the future; they want what they want, and that’s it. Someone else will pay for their drunken sailor binge spending, and they’ll pay for it in a big way.
The evidence is all around us: Greece, Italy, Spain, California and cities like Chicago and Detroit. All of these present-day examples are also the laboratories of the social welfare state.
Detroit, for instance, is basically the Mogadishu of America. Detroit’s infrastructure is crumbling, the city’s housing market is one of the worst in the nation, it has about a 50 percent functional illiteracy rate, and about a quarter of Detroit’s population has fled in the last decade. Can you guess which political party has controlled the city for decades? Detroit is America’s future if we don’t do something now.
I wanted Paul Ryan to run for president, but I’ll certainly take him as vice-president. I’ll admit that I’ve been lukewarm toward Romney over the past two election cycles, but I’m warming up to him, especially after he picked Ryan to be his running mate.
I get the feeling, especially after seeing the standing room only crowds at Lakewood High School there to greet Ryan, that I’m not the only one who feels this way. While fake-but-accurate jackasses like Dan Rather say that Ryan is “toxic,” conservatives are galvanized by the pick. That could go a long way toward winning the election this coming November.
I have much to say about Ryan, beyond his courageous battle to sound the alarm and restore some fiscal sanity to the federal government, and in an upcoming post I will address the other issues he discussed at the rally as well as the hysterical nonsense the left says about him.
