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Republicans in Congress, he suggested, would shred that tradition
under cover of a debate that is only nominally about the budget. “The
fact is,” he said, “their vision is less about reducing the deficit than it
is about changing the basic social compact in America.”
Conservatives would and did object to his implication of
heartlessness, but not necessarily to his assessment of their ambition.
The Republican plan put forward by Representative Paul Ryan of
Wisconsin, the chairman of the Budget Committee, and adopted by
the House on Friday as its policy blueprint for the next decade
contains a substantial dose of deficit reduction but is really a
manifesto for limited government.
It would take big steps toward privatizing Medicare, slash upper-
income tax rates, repeal last year’s health care law, bite deeply into
nearly all federal programs and try to cap the size of government
relative to the economy. But it also imposes a self-consciously moral
judgment on the government’s role, suggesting that the same kind of
demand for added personal responsibility that was embedded in the
1996 overhaul of welfare should now be applied more broadly, to
food stamps, housing aid and health care for the elderly and the poor.
“The safety net should never become a hammock, lulling able-bodied
citizens into lives of complacency and dependency,” Mr. Ryan’s
budget proposal says.
William A. Galston, who was a domestic policy aide to President Bill
Clinton and is now a scholar at the Brookings Institution, said Mr.
Ryan deserved credit of a sort for addressing head-on the
implications of the Republican Party’s increasingly rigid antitax
posture, which since it took root in the late 1970s has put greater and
greater pressure on budgets and the social programs they support.
“It represents the first serious effort to begin to bring Republican
social policy commitments in line with their fiscal and tax
commitments,” Mr. Galston said.

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