A Roadmap for America's Future

by Congressman Paul Ryan

America faces a choice between two economic futures.

In one, ever-rising levels of government spending overwhelm the Federal budget and the U.S. economy with crushing burdens of debt and higher taxes. It is a future in which America’s best century is the past century.

The second future is one in which the principles that created America’s freedom and prosperity are restored.

Currently, we are on a path of unsustainable spending, leading to an inferior standard of living for the next generation:

• To fund our current budget, we must borrow half the money we are spending and nearly half the money we are borrowing is coming from foreign countries. America should not be humiliating itself, going to China and Japan shaking the tin cup for loans to avoid acting like the great and responsible country we always used to be.

• In the final year of President Obama’s budget, we will spend nearly a trillion dollars a year, just on interest. That is more than we spent on defense, education, transportation, veterans, foreign aid, Iraqi reconstruction and the judiciary combined last year.

• The well-intentioned and successful social insurance strategies of the past century – particularly Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid–are headed toward financial collapse. The programs currently consume 40 percent of the entire federal budget

• The baby boomer generation has begun retiring and we will go from 40 million retirees on Social Security and Medicare to 80 million retires in the next 17 years. And within the next five years, the flood of retirees onto entitlement programs will push their unfunded liabilities to $57 trillion, or $500,414 per U.S. household.

We cannot tax our way out of this problem.

Read More...