Paul Ryan: President's Budget Ensures Government Can't Keep Its Promises

House Budget Committee Paul Ryan spoke with Fox News on 2/17/12 about the committee hearing with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. Bill Hemmer: Wisconsin Congressman Republican Paul Ryan and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. This all happened late yesterday afternoon. Here is a sample, listen and watch closely. [Budget Hearing clip] And it went on from there. Paul Ryan, Republican out of Wisconsin and Chairman of the House Budget Committee, is back with me this morning. Paul, it's good to see you. Good morning to you. Congressman Paul Ryan: Good to see you too, Bill. Bill Hemmer: I thought the phrase that stuck out the most was when you said that we are lying to people. Explain that. Congressman Paul Ryan: Our government is, according to the General Accountability Office, making $99.4 trillion dollars in promises to today's Americans that it has no way of paying for. We're making $37 trillion dollars in promises to people fir just Medicare alone that we have no way of paying for. What's happening in Europe is that a bunch of governments and politicians from all political parties who made all of these empty promises to voters and they have no way of paying for those promises. The point I'm trying to make, Bill, is we need to be straight with the country about our real fiscal problems. To tell people the honest situation and then come up with solutions to make sure these empty promises are replaced with programs that provide real security that people can actually count on. And we're not doing that. They are just sweeping it under the rug. Bill Hemmer: Some of these budget numbers blow your mind. Let me get to those in a moment. What did you think of Geithner's response? Congressman Paul Ryan: He's good at testifying. He's good at making sure that you have no YouTube moments I suppose, even though you just put one of those on. He's a smart guy but he doesn't want to really face up to the fact that their budget really does nothing to improve our debt situation. In fact, their budget tries to claim credit for past laws, like the Budget Control Act. When you strip away all the budget gimmicks and the accounting tricks—and Tim knows this—this budget literally does almost nothing to deal with our debt. Instead of the debt going up to 78 percent, under the President's budget it goes up to 76 percent. So literally doing nothing, by stopping Congress from doing anything, our debt will go up to 78 percent. But according to his budget it goes up to 76 percent. That's what is so amazing to us; it's a budget that has net spending increases. He spends an additional $1.5 trillion dollars over the next 10 years. But because he raises taxes by $1.9 trillion dollars, it's the only way you can claim you have about $400 billion dollars of deficit reduction over a 10-year period. A $47 trillion dollar budget over 10 years— Bill Hemmer: It's $11 trillion in debt increase over the next decade. Congressman Paul Ryan: Yes. That's right.