U.S. Headed Toward Bankruptcy, Says Top Budget
Committee Republican
By Terence P. Jeffrey, Editor-in-Chief
08/08/08 "CNSNews"
-- - 05/08/08 -- The ranking Republican on the House Budget
Committee said the U.S. government is headed toward bankruptcy
if it stays on its current fiscal course.
“We know that for a fact,” Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) told
CNSNews.com in a video interview. “All the actuaries, all
the objective scorekeepers of the federal government, are
predicting this.”
To back up this claim, Ryan cited an estimate by the
non-partisan Government Accountability Office that says the
government faces a $53-trillion shortfall to cover the costs of
promised benefits in its entitlement programs.
“They say we are $53 trillion short of fulfilling the promises
the government is making to the American people, in today’s
dollars,” said Ryan.
“Meaning that if we want to keep the promises of Medicare,
Medicaid and Social Security, which are basically the three
major entitlement programs, today we would have to set aside $53
trillion dollars and invest them at Treasury rates in order to
do it,” he said.
Ryan said that to deal with this situation the government must
either reform the entitlement programs or eventually impose
massive tax increases on American workers.
“For the last 40 years, the federal government has had to tax
every dollar made in America at 18.3 cents on that dollar to pay
the bills of the federal government,” said Ryan.
“By the time my three children – who are three, five and six
years old—are my age, the federal government will have to tax 40
cents out of every dollar made in America just to pay the bills
for the federal government at that time,” he said.
Ryan asked the Congressional Budget Office to determine what the
tax rates would need to be to cover federal spending at that
level.
“What they told me was really startling,” said Ryan. “They said
that the current low rate, the 10-percent bracket for low-income
Americans, would have to go up to 25 percent. The middle-income
tax rate for middle-income Americans would have to go up to 66
percent, and the top rate, which is what small businesses pay,
would have to go to 88 percent.
“Those would be the tax rates you would have to have if you
wanted to tax your way out of this problem,” he said. “And if
you did that, all experts conclude, you would literally crash
the American economy.”
Ryan portrayed the long-term budget crisis he believes the
country is now facing as a generational challenge.
“The legacy of this country has always been that each generation
confronts the challenges before it so that the next generation
is better off,” said Ryan. “In the past, we brought down the
Iron Curtain and won the Cold War. We got through World War I.
We got through World War II. We won the war on the Great
Depression.
“The problem that we have right now—putting foreign policy aside
and our fight with Islamic radicalism—is that we have an
economic crisis, we have a fiscal crisis, and, that is, we will
bankrupt this country, and the best century in America will be
the last century,” he added.
“Unless we turn our fiscal situation around and pay off this
debt, and change the way these programs work to a more
sustainable path, the next generation will have inferior living
standards,” said Ryan.
Ryan and his Budget Committee staff have developed a
comprehensive plan for reforming federal taxing-and-spending
policies that they believe will restore long-term solvency to
the federal government.
Entitled “A Roadmap for America’s Future: A Plan to Solve
America’s Long-Term Fiscal and Economic Crisis,” the plan has
been introduced as legislation (H.R. 6110) in the current
Congress.
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