On Face The Nation today, Rep. Paul Ryan reversed years of budgets and claims that the country faces an immediate debt crisis by admitting that there is no debt crisis.
The justification for the harsh cuts in Ryan’s budget has always been his belief that the nation faces an immediate crisis of debt.
Page 14 of his latest budget states the Ryan belief that we face a debt crisis today, “Today, we face a crisis of another sort—one more predictable than the last and more dangerous than ever. We face the threat of a debt crisis.”
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As recently as January, Rep. Ryan was talking about the urgency of the debt crisis, “What I was really hoping was he would say, ‘I want to deal with this debt crisis before it takes our economy off the rails, before it guarantees our children and our grand children are sated with our debts.’ That’s really what I was aching to hear.”
Today, Paul Ryan completely reversed himself and admitted that there is no debt crisis.
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Rep. Ryan said something completely different today, “To borrow a phrase from my friend Erskine Bowles, we are the healthiest-looking horse in the glue factory. That means America is still a step ahead of the European nations who are confronting a debt crisis, of Japan, that’s in its second lost decade. It’s probably because of our resilient economy, because of our world currency status. So we do not have a debt crisis right now. But, we see it coming. We know it’s irrefutably happening. And the point we’re trying to make with our budget is, let’s get ahead of this problem.”
In less than a week Ryan has gone from hide the women and children because the debt crisis is coming to kill us all, to someday we will be facing a debt crisis if we don’t get a jump on this.
Ryan’s change of course echoed John Boehner’s agreement with President Obama that there is no immediate debt crisis. What Rep. Ryan did today was trash his own budget. The entire idea behind his “Path to Prosperity” budgets is that the nation has to take dramatic action now, or else the country is doomed.
The debt crisis that Paul Ryan told us that we faced on Tuesday doesn’t really exist by Sunday.
Ryan, Boehner, and other congressional Republicans are trying to shift their base because they want to do a budget deal with Senate Democrats. In order to try to make a deal tolerable, the debt crisis that Ryan campaigned on while running for vice president last year can’t exist anymore.
Paul Ryan’s reality challenged budget isn’t even a good starting point for negotiations, so it had to go.
House Republicans, like Paul Ryan and John Boehner, are hoping that their base doesn’t notice that the debt crisis they sold them for the last three years was a total lie.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
