It was Ryan's way of saying that the financial meltdown arrived largely without warning, while the impending fiscal crunch is like a runaway freight train.
"This is the most predictable crisis in the history of our country," he went on. "We are on our path to a debt crisis" like those we've seen recently in Europe, with the national debt as a percentage of gross domestic product rising, under President Obama's budget, past the 90 percent danger point on its way to 800 percent.
At some point in between, as Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff explains in the Financial Times, interest rates spike and the government is forced to make draconian cuts.
Those Social Security checks? They can be cut anytime, as the Supreme Court held in Flemming v. Nestor in 1960. Congress can do that just as quickly as it voted $700 billion to bail out the banks in the fall of 2008.
Ryan's budget attempts to prevent that by restructuring taxes and spending programs so the national debt as a percentage of GDP will start sliding down.
Tax rates would be lowered and the tax base broadened, much as Congress did in 1986. Federal spending would revert to 2008 levels and be frozen for five years.
Corporate welfare programs, including green energy, would be ended. Defense spending would be at levels recommended by Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
Medicaid would be converted into block grants to the states, which would give them new incentives to hold down costs.
Medicare would be converted, for those now under age 55, to a program like federal employees' health benefit plans and the Medicare prescription drug program. Seniors would have a choice of plans and would receive "premium support" -- federal supplements varying in size depending on income and health.
First Thoughts on the Ryan Plan - Megan McArdle
The broad outlines of the plan would work, from a budgetary perspective. It reduces the deficit to a smaller percentage of GDP than either the current-law baseline or the more likely "alternative fiscal scenario". On the other hand, politically, it seems very unlikely to pass in anything like its current form--the Ryan plan actually cuts spending, as a percentage of GDP, from its historical levels. Given the burden of Baby Boomer retirements that we have promised to cover--and the GOP's craven cowardice and shameless pandering in the face of the senior lobby--I don't see how spending is going to fall in the near-to-medium term.
That is a reasonable objection, but not a fatal one. Most bold plans get negotiated. The question is whether the GOP is actually willing to negotiate, or somehow believes that it can get its way through sheer bloody-mindedness. With GOP freshmen idiotically cheering a potential government shutdown, as though this had anything at all to do with getting government spending or deficits under control, "bloody-mindedness" seems like the more credible current explanation.
On the other hand, they've hardly got a monopoly on that. The wildly disproportionate fury and outrage which greeted both Bowles-Simpson and the Ryan plan from the left indicate that progressives have so far failed to come to grips with the fact that they are going to have to compromise: that while some of the gap is going to be closed by tax increases, some of it is going to be closed by spending cuts. And not just defense cuts, or seemingly trivial changes to physician reimbursement rates that we hope will snowball over time, but actual cuts in services that people currently want and expect to get from government--but do not want or expect to pay for.
