Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan seems to have missed the train to free lunch land, as Business Week discusses:
Now he’s on a mission to spark serious debate about entitlement spending that he argues will “swallow us alive” if left unchecked.
Ryan feels the urgency of the problem so strongly that he isn’t afraid to touch the third rail of American politics. In a recently revised 2008 proposal, he suggests partially privatizing Medicare and Social Security, the two biggest entitlements, to prevent their insolvency and curb debt.
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House Budget Chairman John Spratt Jr., a South Carolina Democrat, calls his proposals “really gutsy” because they “hit some important constituencies right between the eyes.”
Ryan says his job is to sound the warning of impending fiscal doom. “What if you knew your congressman knew the timing, scope, nature, and cause of that financial crisis well ahead of time, in time to stop it, but chose not to because it wasn’t good politics for him? You’d want to fire that guy.”
