“Rep. Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget committee, will propose fundamental reforms to Medicare and Medicaid in the GOP budget expected to be released Tuesday, implying in a Fox News Sunday interview that the deficit savings would exceed $4 trillion…

“When President Obama ignored the proposals of his own fiscal commission, it was an indication that he had chosen politics over leadership. That is, it was more important for him to goad Republicans into proposing entitlement reform so Democrats could attack them for it, then it was for him to try and actually address the nation’s challenges. Evidently, Ryan has decided to take the opposite approach.”

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“Even as the two parties struggled over the weekend to reach a deal on federal spending for the next six months and avert a government shutdown at the end of the week, House Republicans were completing a budget proposal for next year and beyond. It is likely to spur an ideological showdown over the size of government and the role of entitlement programs like Medicaid and Medicare…

“‘Ryan isn’t touching the third rail,’ Mr. Cole said, employing the expression used to suggest that messing with Social Security and Medicare can be politically fatal. ‘He is wrapping both hands around it.’…

“Republican leaders have not previously embraced Mr. Ryan’s proposals on Medicare and Social Security, but Mr. Boehner said he had tired of watching Congress avoid difficult decisions on entitlement programs.

“‘You can’t continue to whistle past the graveyard,’ he said. ‘We are imprisoning the future for our kids and our grandkids if we do not act, and it’s time to act.'”

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Via the Daily Caller.

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“‘We are giving them a political weapon to go out against us, but they will have to lie and demagogue to make that a political weapon,’ [Ryan] said. ‘They are going to demagogue us, and it’s that demagoguery that has always prevented political leaders in the past from actually trying to fix the problem. We can’t keep kicking this can down the road.'”

“He added, ‘Shame on them if they do that.'”