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Club for Growth is absolutely right. The Ryan budget is miles better than anything from the Democrats or the RINOs in the middle but it does little to cut the deficits now. We should ignore any budget plan that has numbers going out for more than 5 years. I don’t care how many trillion your budget will save us by 2040 or 2050. That is all pie in the sky fantasy. Did our 1920 budget projections include the Great Depression? Did our 1930 budget projections predict the Second World War? Did our budget predictions in 2000 predict the War on Terror or 2008 financial collapse. 30 year budget models are no more real than global warming computer models, even when good people like Ryan make them. Any serious deficit/debt plan will address the deficits with harsh cuts leading to a balanced budget within one to two terms of a president.

First, the budget doesn’t balance within 10 years, or for that matter, even 20 years. Our country is currently enduring unsustainable trillion-dollar deficits. We cannot wait until 2040 — the year the Ryan budget balances (page 84) — in order to arrest our ever-growing national debt.

This has been my objection. I presume the $5.3 Trillion target is the most Paul Ryan believes he can get, politically. But the truth is that we need more on the order of $15 Trillion in cuts over the next ten years (our deficits have been running on the order of $1.5 Trillion per year) to have any hope of saving the Republic. The only way to do this is to dismantle the entitlement state, starting today. This includes phasing out all welfare and subsidies, phasing out social security, adjusting/phasing out UNFUNDED Federal retirements, and requiring that all Federal retirements be funded as we go, (i.e. every year the govt matches a certain amount which is placed in your account like a 401K or an IRA, when you retire you own what is in that account, nothing more.)

We have been acting as if living within your means is optional.

Forget about projections, as written the Ryan “budget” is a work of fiction - it is quite specific about (politically popular) reduction of tax rates and completely non-specific about the (politically unpopular) tax “reforms” that are supposed to make it “revenue neutral”.

Real world, the almost certain result is *increased* deficits.

At the risk of being tiresome, I’ll say it again:

The only thing more dangerous to the country’s fiscal health than “Tax and spend Democrats” are “Spend but don’t tax Republicans”.