Showing posts with label fiscal hawk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fiscal hawk. Show all posts

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Portrait Of A Fiscal Hawk


Fortune Magazine has a good article on Rep. Paul Ryan - a Congressman who recently arrived on the national stage with his articulate criticism of Obama's health care plans. The article discusses Ryan's economic plans to put America back on a sound - and sane - fiscal footing.:

What is the Ryan plan , and why is the Obama administration seemingly obsessed with it? Ryan calls his proposal, published in January, the Roadmap for America's Future. It's a remarkably comprehensive, daring manifesto that tackles every part of the budget on a presidential scale, from Social Security to tax policy to health-care reform.

The goal is to eliminate the deficit, and eventually all federal debt, without any crippling tax increases. Under Ryan's plan, for example, federal spending would reach just 24% of GDP in 2035 and then fall, vs. the CBO's projection of 34% and rising from there. Ryan would make the deficit disappear by mid-century. . . .

Do read the whole article. Ryan, like Chris Christie, are people to watch as the Dems promise to lead us down an insane fiscal path - until 2012.

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Thursday, March 4, 2010

Gov. Chris Christie - What Leadership Looks Like

Articulate fiscal hawks like Paul Ryan in the House and Chris Christie as Governor of New Jersey give a glimmer of hope that our deeply listing ship of state might yet be righted. I have blogged on Ryan here. Today, from Plumb Bob Blog, comes a post on Christie's actions to date and his most recent speech to the assembled Mayors of New Jersey. This from Plumb Bob Blog:

Speaking, as I was this morning, of politicians with the stones to make the necessary cuts in spending…

Mike Shedlock (with a hat tip to Michelle Malkin) reported on a remarkable speech by New Jersey’s new governor, Chris Christie to the New Jersey League of Municipalities, that illustrates what Real Men® who hold office will have to be doing for the next several decades.

He minces no words:

• government programs will have to be cut

• government salaries and benefits will have to be cut to the size and scope of comparable private sector salaries and benefits

• government-worker unions will have to cede power

• tax increases are not an option, and

• politicians will have to behave as though the next election does not matter.

In just five, tense weeks of holding office, he already has actions to match his words; budget officers showed him 378 ways to freeze spending to close a $2.3 billion gap in a $6 billion pool of money in the budget, and he signed 375 of them. . . .

Unfortunately, Gov. Christie's speech is not on YouTube yet, but it is on video here. It is well worth the time to listen. Christie shows what leadership looks like. Compare and contrast that with the left's (and some on the right's) treatment of Sen. Bunning for merely having the temerity to suggest that the left, having just paraded in front of the cameras in their new fiscal hawk costumes after passing pay-go, actually pay for yet another extension of unemployment benefits. That is the opposite of leadership. Unfortunately, it appears to be pervasive throughout Congress and the Executive Branch today.

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