Tonight Congressman Paul Ryan will speak to a massive audience following President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address. Congressman Ryan has loads of power as the head of the Congressional Budget Committee, and a winning plan to dump the currently unsustainable version of Medicare and replace it with vouchers. His Roadmap for America also solves the coming Social Security crisis.
It is clear to me that to reduce the deficit and dramatically shrink the federal government America must junk Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security and replace the three with sensible programs administered at the state level. The federal government should be out of the loop, and not involve itself is so many aspects of citizens’ lives.
To further streamline the operations of the federal government, scrapping the tax code in favor of a manageable flat tax coupled with a manageable consumption tax might be the best option, with no tax on savings and estates.
The defense budget could easily be whittled down by engaging in an orderly withdrawal of U.S. troops from foreign soil and closing bases in the U.S. that exist merely as pork-barrel spending for the home districts of congressmen.
Gutting the Department of Education in favor of placing the states in charge of their own education priorities is another needed federal reform. The charter school approach that has served New Orleans so well should be a model for this change.
After the rebuttal by Paul Ryan, I would expect FreedomWorks to engage in their own rebuttal of the State of the Union address. Look for Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe in the coming days to lay out why the President’s coming call for more spending is simply wrong. President Obama is planning to call for more spending on education and health care at the federal level, as “investments” in America. With crushing fiscal deficits I don’t see the need for more federal investment. America needs a growth of private investment, not hampered by government crowding out in the debt markets.
As a quick note this morning, think about this: when public sector unions shut down government during a strike, liberals applaud the shut down as a show of power on the part of the unions. But when conservative Congressmen, officials duly elected to run the government itself, even whisper that a temporary government shut down may be necessary to balance the budget, liberals go wild with rage. Fred Siegel writes in the Wall Street Journal this morning about just how cunning socialist liberals have been in their use of government shut downs by unions to take control of the once less-radical Democratic Party. As the efforts of Frances Fox Piven highlight, the left will stop at nothing to incite rioting and strikes against those seeking to rationalize the size and scope of government until the rioters get what they want. Piven has recently written;
An effective movement of the unemployed will have to look something like the strikes and riots that have spread across Greece in response to the austerity measures forced on the Greek government by the European Union, or like the student protests that recently spread with lightning speed across England in response to the prospect of greatly increased school fees.
The videos of these events showed violent outrage at austerity measures created to protect taxpayers from their government’s impending collapse. Were these riots justified? Hell no. And there is no way austerity measures created to protect taxpayers justify violence.
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