Rep. Paul Ryan, whom Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has picked as his running mate, told CNSNews.com four years ago, in August 2008, that the U.S. was heading toward bankruptcy on the fiscal path it was then following and that it would be “mindboggling” to make the problem worse by adding the sort of health-care plan that then-Sen. Barack Obama was advocating in his presidential campaign.

CNSNews.com asked Ryan: “If our country, if the federal government of the United States, stays on the fiscal path it is currently following, is the government going to go bankrupt down the road?"

“Yes. We know that for a fact,” said Ryan. “All the actuaries, all the objective score-keepers of the federal government are predicting this. So, this much we know. What we know is our government is growing at an unsustainable pace and it will overwhelm our economy’s ability to pay the bills.”

Since CNSNews.com first published Ryan making this prediction on Aug. 4, 2008, the debt of the federal government has grown by $6.35 trillion -- rising 66 percent, from $9,565,042,361,845.53 then to $15,915,814,457,919.46 now.

Ryan then pointed out that estimates by the Government Accountability Office at that time indicated that the U.S. government already faced $53 trillion in unfunded liability to pay the promises it had made through entitlement programs, including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Each year the government put off dealing with these problems, Ryan said, the unfunded liabilities would increase by $3 trillion. To pay for these government promises without reforming the entitlement programs themselves, Ryan explained, would require imposing massive tax increases on future generations of Americans.

Ryan said he had asked the Congressional Budget Office to calculate what the tax rates would need to be on Americans of his childrens’ generation to pay for the entitlement promises the government had already made.

“Well, what they told me was really startling,” said Ryan. “They said that the current low rate, the 10 percent bracket for low-income Americans, would have to go up to 25 percent. The middle-income tax rates for middle-income Americans would have to go up to 66 percent. And the top rate, which is what small businesses pay, would have to go up to 88 percent. Those would be the tax rates you would have to if you wanted to tax your way out of this problem. And if you did that, all experts conclude you would literally crash the American economy.”

If we continued down the fiscal road we were on, Ryan said, America would be bankrupted and the children and grandchildren of his generation would be forced into a lower standard of living than Americans have enjoyed in the past.

“What is happening is that these three entitlement programs -- Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security—are going to basically to crowd out the rest of the federal budget,” said Ryan. “In about 30 years, they consume 100 percent of the budget. Right now, entitlements are about 60 percent of the federal budget. In about 20 to 30 years, the estimates are that they crowd out 100 percent of the federal budget.

“And we all know that we are going to have an army, we are going to have a navy, we are going to do these other things that the federal government does,” said Ryan. “So, that piles on top of it.

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Editor's Note: Incidentally, the Ryan Budget plan that Progressives and Liberal Democrats demonize closes tax loopholes for the "wealthy" so that everyone can have a lower tax rate. Additionally, far from what the political opportunists insist, the Ryan budget plan does not affect anyone currently receiving Social Security benefits. It offers a new hybrid program for those born after 1957...and that hybrid plan pays an massively better return than Social Security does today. A new report that came out last week shows that future Social Security recipients will be the first to glean less from the program than what they put in...the Ponzi scheme has begun to fail. Please watch these three videos so that you know the truth about the Ryan Budget. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)


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