House Budget Committee Paul Ryan Ryan painted a stark choice facing American voters fall. “If you keep the way these entitlements work in tact, with little changes here and there, and then more tax increases, you are just putting us on the European path to austerity,” Ryan said of an Obama second term.
“Those kinds of packages won’t succeed in preventing a debt crisis. We’ll pass one round of austerity, that won’t work, then the bond markets will get us, then we’ll do another round and another round, just like what Europe is going through now. We will have chosen to go on the path to decline and we’ll have a lost decade,” Ryan explained. “We see the president and his party are basically practicing lost decade economics,” he finished.
Moving to the Republican alternative, Ryan explained, “We think we have one more great chance, if the elections go the right way, to turn this thing around once and for all. And address it, the right way, up front. With real entitlement reform, restructuring these programs. Real tax reform to get back to growth. We want growth we want opportunity, we want reform, so that we fix this the American way.”
Asked if this was all possible considering how unlikely it is that the Republicans will win 60 votes in the Senate, Ryan said, “It can be done through reconciliation. That is the whole idea. The whole thing can be done through reconciliation.”
Pressed later to describe House Republican contingency plans should Mitt Romney lose, Ryan said, “There is no Plan B … Plan B is austerity.”
