The Corner

Ryan and the Middle Class

Unveiling his new budget proposal, Paul Ryan once again reminds us that he is one of the few men in Washington with guts and brains operating in harmony. His budget asks the big question in American politics: What is the middle class willing to give up in order to save the country?

I am afraid that the answer will be: Not very much.

Ryan’s Medicare and Medicaid reforms are both slow, workable, conservative solutions to the fiscal imbalances of those programs. The American middle class may not accept Medicare reform willingly, but it is something close to a mathematical certainty that it ultimately will accept it in some form: One possible form is that the checks stop coming as the nation becomes insolvent, another is that the government pays benefits nominally to the penny but radically devalues the dollar to do so. I suspect that the Ryan plan, or something like it, will be enacted long before that happens. We’re stupid, but we’re not that stupid.




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