Republicans may not be able to hit home runs if they take over the Senate in November, but Paul Ryan says he hopes his party can hit singles and doubles when it comes to spending and taxing.
In an appearance on Fox Business Monday to discuss his new book, the GOP budget writer and Wisconsin congressman said that the first order of business for Republicans in control of both chambers would be to address a few smaller fiscal items that would be coming due. Those include a looming cut to Medicare payments to physicians, the exhaustion of the trust fund for highway spending, and scheduled cuts to defense spending through sequestration.
Acknowledging that larger reforms to spending or taxation would likely remain out of reach during President Obama’s tenure, Ryan said he hoped he could use a GOP majority in the upper chamber for a smaller deal on the budget, like the one that he struck with Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray, D-Wash., in December that set government spending for two years.
“What we would like to do, in my opinion, is get at least singles or doubles. Maybe not the grand slam of all agreements, but that’s what Patty and I shot for, a medium agreement. I think we should try to do another one of those and get the president to do things that [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid has prevented him from having to do, meaning, make a decision.”
In addition to approving budgets, Ryan mentioned passing a bill to approve the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, a measure he described as a “no-brainer” that Reid has prevented Obama “from having to make a decision on.”
But Ryan acknowledged that the president could derail those modest goals, saying that he “has to be willing to work with us … he must be willing to embrace some modest entitlement reforms that most people agree with.”
Although Republicans have not laid out a detailed agenda for the 114th Congress, Ryan cited his new book, The Way Forward published in August, as a specific course of action. In an interview with the Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein earlier in September, Ryan warned his party not to assume that there would be a wave in favor of Republicans this fall, saying, “I think you’ve gotta give people a reason to vote for you.”
In the budgets that he has authored as chairman of the House Budget Committee, Ryan has laid out sweeping plans for cutting spending, reforming entitlements and revamping the tax code to reduce the federal government’s indebtedness.
In Monday’s interview, Ryan acknowledged that the growth in the debt, currently expected to reach 74 percent of U.S. economic output by the end of the year, has not threatened the government’s fiscal credibility as quickly as he previously thought it would. “We’ve gone longer than we thought we could,” he said.
But he also warned that the quickly falling annual deficits, which the Congressional Budget Office expects to begin growing again later in the decade, are a “mirage,” and that the debt will become unsustainable when the Federal Reserve allows interest rates to rise from their current low levels.
