Competing Deficit Reduction Plans: Simpson-Bowles vs. Paul Ryan

Unlike the President's 2012 budget (which was rejected unanimously by both the House and Senate in May), both the 2010 Simpson-Bowles Deficit Reduction Commission plan and the 2012 House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan plan, called the Path to Prosperity, earned respect for their serious, bipartisan efforts to bring federal deficits under control. 

William Beach of The Heritage Foundation praised Simpson-Bowles for getting "the right conversation started."

Yes, the final report would have benefited from no tax hikes, more entitlement reform and bigger spending cuts. But it was encouraging to see political appointees and politicians finally engage in the necessary work to save this country from the future we see in France, Great Britain and Greece. As these and other nations are showing, when the government runs out of other people's money, it can be a very bad thing. This is particularly true if you are under 30 and have your entire economic life ahead of you...

And Erskine Bowles praised the Ryan plan and its author:

AEI: 3 Things You Should Know about Paul Ryan's Medicare Reform - in 100 Words

"Clip and save" these "key facts about Paul Ryan's approach to saving Medicare," writes James Pethokoukis at AEI:

1. No one over the age of 55 would be affected in any way.

2. Traditional Medicare fee-for-service would remain available for all. “Premium support”—that is, government funding of private insurance plans chosen by individuals—is an option for those who choose it. No senior would be forced out of the traditional Medicare program against his will.

3. Overall funding for Medicare under the Ryan-Wyden plan is scheduled to grow at the same rate as under President Obama’s proposals. Is this “gutting Medicare” and “ending Medicare as we know it”? In reality, it’s the market giving seniors cheaper, higher quality choices they can take if they wish, with the traditional program remaining an option.

Who is Paul Ryan?

In Man With a Plan, reporter Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard traces Paul Ryan's career from his early college days as a Capitol Hill summer intern to how he became the intellectual leader of his party.

UPDATE — via powerlineblog.com the opening lines of Ryan's CPAC speech:

There are those who say modern society is too complicated for the average man or woman to deal with. This is a long-standing argument, but we heard it more frequently after the mortgage credit collapse and financial meltdown in 2008. They say we need more experts and technocrats making more of our economic decisions for us. And they argue for less “political interference” with the enlightened bureaucrats … by which they mean less objection by the people to the overregulation of society. 

If we choose to have a federal government that tries to solve every problem, then as long as society keeps growing more complex, government must keep on growing right along with it. The rule of law by the people must be reduced and the arbitrary discretion of experts expanded. . .

If the average American can’t handle complexity in his or her own life, and only government experts can … then government must direct the average American about how to live his or her life. Freedom becomes a diminishing good.
But there’s a major flaw in this “progressive’” argument, and it’s this. It assumes there must be someone or some few who do have all the knowledge and information. We just have to find, train, and hire them to run the government’s agencies.

Friedrich Hayek called this collectivism’s “fatal conceit.” The idea that a few bureaucrats know what’s best for all of society, or possess more information about human wants and needs than millions of free individuals interacting in a free market is both false and arrogant. It has guided collectivists for two centuries down the road to serfdom — and the road is littered with their wrecked utopias. The plan always fails!

Pethokoukis: Fed Caused Great Recession, Not Bushonomics

So says a new book by Robert Hetzel, senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. James Pethokoukis at AEI gets in the economic weeds so we don't have to.  He writes:

The president argues that it was the unchecked, reckless, casino capitalism of the George W. Bush years — bank deregulation, tax cuts for the rich — that lead to the nation’s worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. And if Mitt Romney is elected in November, the Republican will bring those policies right back, risking another financial collapse.

But a book by Robert Hetzel, a senior economist at Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, says it wasn’t Bushonomics or greedy bankers or broken markets that caused the Great Recession. In The Great Recession: Market Failure or Policy Failure, Hetzel pins the blame squarely on the Federal Reserve and Team Bernanke.

Answering Stupid Statements

Richard Fulmer at ricochet.com says "sometimes a question is the best response" to stupid liberal comments, so he offers a few snappy questions to stupid answers that will bring a smile:

Answer: I am a true solipsist. (Gorgias)
Question: So why tell me?

A: There is no truth. (Gustave Flaubert)
Q: Is that true?

A: Knowledge is unknowable. (Francisco Sanches)
Q: How do you know?

A: It is irrational to assume that tomorrow will be anything like today. (David Hume)
Q: So you learned to speak, read, and write because…?

A: All cultures are equally valid. (Franz Boas)
Q: Including those that teach that all other cultures are invalid?

A: Truth is created, not discovered. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
Q: Did you just make that up?

A: There is no free will. (Baron d’Holbach)
Q: What makes you say that?

York: Voter Fraud IS a Concern

The argument against Voter ID laws becomes much harder to make when 1,099 felons vote in race won by 312 ballots, as happened in the Minnesota Senate race between Al Franken and Norm Coleman. Byron York cites a new book, Who's Counting, that catalogues the whole range of voter fraud issues and maintains "the integrity of the ballot box is just as important to the credibility of elections as access to it."

Chick-fil-A, Gays, Marriage, and Tolerance

Chick-Fil-A had a great day Wednesday, as did the millions of Americans who quietly showed their support for traditional marriage, free speech, and free enterprise. Fr. Dwight Longenecker called it “the triumph of the ordinary.”

Yesterday’s Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day was the sort of ‘revolt’ this country needs, but it was even better than the non violent revolutions and peaceful protests which have changed the world because it was so ordinary. It was just plain, ordinary Americans getting in their cars and doing a plain, ordinary American thing: going out for lunch to a fast food joint. It was just plain, ordinary Americans doing something plain and ordinary, but positive and joyful and good. In buying an ordinary tasty chicken sandwich at their corner fast food emporium ordinary Americans were expressing the wish to be left alone to be ordinary Americans.

Gays, lesbians, and bisexuals are a tiny fraction of the U.S. population—3.5% at most, according to demographer Gary J. Gates of the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at UCLA. (The population is even smaller in the United Kingdom, where a national 2010 Integrated Household Survey found that only 1.5% of Britons say they are gay, lesbian or bisexual.)

Yet they so militantly promote their lifestyle and agenda that they have fooled many Americans into believing that they are a much larger segment of the population.

A 2011 Gallup survey found that only 4% of American adults estimated—correctly—that gays and lesbians were less than 5% of the U.S. population.  Over half (52%) of adults in the U.S. thought 1 in 5 Americans were gay, and 35% of adults thought 1 in 4 were gay.  Women, young people, lower-income and less educated Americans have been snookered most (see chart below):

Americans with lower incomes and less education give the highest estimates, on average, of the U.S. gay and lesbian population, and far higher estimates than those with higher incomes and more education. Americans aged 18 to 29 give a higher average estimate than older Americans, and women give a far higher average estimate than men.

"For all the talk of the traditional marriage supporters being full of hate, there was not hatred apparent” on Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day, notes Fr. Longenecker.  Hate is the currency of the Left these days: Hate for centuries of traditions and definitions that don’t suit its contemporary whims. Hate for speech that isn’t synonymous with its own. Hate for a free-enterprise system that refuses to buckle to the un-ordinary demands of a tiny segment of the population.

No, no hate Wednesday, just (as Fr. Longenecker put it) "ordinary Americans sticking up for their way of life by buying a chicken sandwich with their friends and neighbors.”