The Radical Gradualism of Paul Ryan

The status quo is far more ‘extreme’ than the Republican budget
Apr 18, 2011
By YUVAL LEVINS

Late last month, Senator Charles Schumer of New York led a conference call in which Senate Democrats briefed reporters about the ongoing budget battle. At the outset, unaware that his comments were already audible to reporters on the line, Schumer provided some marching orders, advising his colleagues to describe Republican proposals as radical. “I always use the word extreme,” he said. “That’s what the caucus instructed me to use this week.”

It was no surprise, therefore, that when House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan released the Republican budget proposal for 2012 last week, Democrats in Washington called it radical and extreme. The White House labeled the plan unbalanced. Representative Chris Van Hollen, the senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee, called it “ideology on steroids.” Iowa senator Tom Harkin said the Ryan plan “gives new meaning to the term extreme.”

But it wasn’t only Democrats who seemed struck by the radical character of Ryan’s proposal. Many supporters of his budget, too, noted above all its boldness, or its wholehearted fiscal conservatism, which is just another way to say that he proposes a dramatic change. the rest

On the contrary, underlying the Ryan budget is a vision of security and stability, of gradual reform of the welfare state in the face of changing circumstances. The document is full of calls to save the social safety net and “[fulfill] the mission of health and retirement security for all Americans.” Its basic aim is to avoid sudden or radical breaks, because predictability and security are essential both for enabling growth and for instilling confidence in consumers, producers, investors, and creditors.


This explains, for instance, why this supposed embodiment of conservative extremism doesn’t fully balance the budget for two decades. The Ryan budget begins to turn things around quickly​—​reaching primary balance (that is, a balance between taxing and spending excluding interest payments) and beginning to reduce the relative size of the debt by 2015​—​but it doesn’t reach a truly balanced budget until the 2030s. To get to such balance right away would require enormous immediate cuts in entitlement benefits or massive tax hikes, either of which would be highly disruptive both to people’s lives and to the performance of the economy.