American Elephants

Here’s Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI), Chairman of the House Budget Committee, with the weekly Republican address.  Chairman Ryan has produced a courageous budget, tackling  heretofore unaddressed entitlements.   He has changed the nature of the conversation and of the battle.  Earlier in the week, Majority Leader Harry Reid was wailing about dying women, and by late Friday, he was admitting that we had budget problems that had to be addressed.

The Democrat’s position had been that there was no problem and they needed to go right on spending. President Obama’s budget request raised the spending ante sharply.  He is now saying that ‘we need to cut, but we don’t have to do it with a machete, we can do it with a scalpel.’  I don’t believe that the president is willing to cut anything major at all. He said in Fairless Hills that he wants a budget for 2011 that still invests in clean energy, research, infrastructure and education, a strong indication that he has no intention of cutting anything except those things important to Republicans like, say, National Security and Defense.

We need to help people to understand how dire our situation is, and what a short window we have open to do something about it.  Paul Ryan is really good at this. That’s real leadership.