Paul Ryan: President's Budget Doesn't Even Pretend To Fix Our Debt Crisis

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) appeared Fox News on Valentine's Day, 2012 to discuss the President's FY2013 budget. RYAN: What's wrong with it most of all is what it doesn't do. It doesn't fix our problem. He doesn't even pretend to actually fix our fiscal problem. So instead of having sort of an American built to last, I would call it American drowning in debt. And then when you strip away all the accounting gimmicks and all the counting tricks -- take all that way, it doesn't come close to even doing what he says it does. He says it reduces the deficit by $4 trillion. Doesn't do any of that when you strip away all the budget gimmicks. It increases spending net over $1.5 trillion, increases taxes by $1.9 trillion, and has a measly $400 billion of deficit reduction over an entire 10-year period. VAN SUSTEREN: Well, let me ask you about... RYAN: So he's proposing to spend $47 trillion over 10 years. And so instead of increasing our debt by 78 percent, which is what the status quo is doing, he's increasing debt by 76 percent, $11 trillion added to our national debt under of this budget. VAN SUSTEREN: All right, explain -- explain something to me because the president submits a budget and we get projections for fiscal year 2013. RYAN: That's right. VAN SUSTEREN: And then we get a set of numbers which shows what's going to happen over the next nine years after that. And that, of course, is not taking into account that next year, another budget's going to be set with another direction, whether up or down, whether he's the president or another one's the president or whatever. And so this is almost sort of the -- sort of the stream of numbers we see out in the future are completely phony. RYAN: Well, they're projections. And you have to project where government is going in the future so you set your tax policies accordingly, you can set your spending policies. You can tell whether Medicare is going bankrupt, for example, which it is in 2021, according to CBO, or 2024, according to Medicare. So the future does matter... VAN SUSTEREN: Well, it does matter, but... RYAN: ... but it's also the trajectory of the policies. So it shows the path the president has put us on based on his policies that he's calling for. And since 61 percent of the budget is on autopilot, that just shows you how this debt is just going on autopilot up. And the President's literally doing nothing about it. He's actually chasing higher spending with higher taxes. And he's doing nothing to address the drivers of our debt. We will have a debt crisis in this country. That's going to happen. That's -- and the frustrating, disappointing thing about this, Greta, is he knows this. He knows we have a debt crisis in this country. And what's troubling to those of us who care so much about this country, about our economy, about people not being lied to with empty promises of benefits, about people living on the safety net, about people counting on a Medicare and Social Security, if we don't do something to fix these programs, then those people are going to hurt the first.... Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/on-the-record/2012/02/15/ryan-obama-budget-plan-campaign-gimmick-does-nothing-fix-nations-fiscal-problem#ixzz1mT55l0es