Fiscal conservatives will no longer have a champion of Ryan’s sway in the Capitol come January—and it’ll be a long time before they have one in the White House.
This timeline is important. The speaker’s retirement announcement came two days after the Congressional Budget Office released its latest long-term spending projections. There was no news under the section labeled “Trust Funds” for people who read this sort of stuff regularly—just a reminder. CBO forecasted that the balances of the two largest trust funds, Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (Social Security) and Hospital Insurance (Medicare), will plummet in the next 15 years. “According to CBO’s most recent long-term projections, the balance of the OASI trust fund will be exhausted in calendar year 2031,” it wrote. The HI trust fund has until 2026.
By then, either there will be a Democrat in the Oval Office, or a Republican not named Trump will have been president for a year. What made Ryan unique among elected advocates of entitlement reform was his urgency. He wanted Congress and the White House and the American people to get ahead of the problem. Now, like his tenure, they’re out of time.
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