The goal of the government should be to help people “reach their potential” and “make the most of their lives,” not make them dependent on the state, House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan said Sunday morning.
In his first major interview since the presidential election, in which he and his running mate Mitt Romney were handily defeated by President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, Ryan defended his comment that “we’re getting toward a society where we have a net majority of takers versus makers” – a remark that President Obama indirectly slammed in his inguration speech last Monday.
“We don’t want a dependency culture. We want a safety net that makes sure that people don’t fall through the cracks, that gets people on their feet,” Ryan told David Gregory on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press.’ “And so our concern in this country is with the idea that more and more able-bodied people are becoming dependent upon the government than upon themselves for their livelihoods. We wanna make sure that we don’t continue that trend.”
During Monday’s speech the President said that, “The commitments we make to each other through Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, these things do not sap our nation – they strengthen us. They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.” The President’s comments were widely viewed as a rebuke on Ryan, the GOP’s 2012 vice-presidential nominee, who has long been a proponent of extensive reforms to America’s entitlement programs, especially the ones the President mentioned in his speech.
In turn, Ryan accused President Obama of engaging in a dishonest debate about the entitlement reforms Republicans want to make and the reasons why they want make them just so he can win the argument. It is not, as Obama and other Democrats suggest, because the GOP doesn’t care about seniors, children and poor people, Ryan argued.
“Here’s the point we’ve been making all along. We want to have a safety net – a safety net that’s there for the vulnerable, for the poor, for people who cannot help themselves,” Ryan said. “But we don’t want to have a culture in this country that encourages more dependency, that saps and drains people of their ability to make the most of their lives. We want opportunity,” he said.
In the interview Ryan emphasized that the GOP is taking such a hard line on entitlement reform because it cares so much about the children of the country, and bloated entitlement programs will hurt future generations more than it will help them.
“When we see our nation destroying our children’s future by saddling them with a debt they can’t handle, we gotta to do something about that,” he said.
Ryan said that America’s looming debt crisis is “not an if question, it’s a when question,” therefore people, including President Obama, need to take it more seriously. Of the most important reforms that the U.S. needs to make to save itself from financial ruin, is reforms entitlement programs like food stamps. “All we’re saying is you actually have to be eligible for this program to receive this program,” he said. “We need to target these things at people that actually need them.”
The former VP candidate said he’s been mostly silent since the election on the issues facing the country because he wanted to give the President a chance to govern responsibly first. However, Ryan said that President Obama’s behavior in the last few months have shown him that Obama is more interested “political conquest than political compromise.” Ryan said he is speaking out now because he wants to be part of the solution to America’s problems.
