Rep. Ryan Touts Plan to Avoid Fiscal Ruin

House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan is beating the drum for his 2012 budget, which features some $6.2 trillion in cuts over the next decade, as an answer to what he warns is a nation facing the danger of decline owing to its “monumental debt,” according to a report by Politico.

Some of the plan’s features:

∙ Spending for domestic government agencies would be cut back to 2008 levels and frozen at that level for five years.

∙ Accepting Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s plan to target inefficiencies at the Pentagon. A Government Accountability Office audit found $70 billion in waste at the Pentagon in the last two years.

∙ Forcing reforms to Medicare -- proposing that beginning in 2022, beneficiaries get the same kind of healthcare coverage that members of Congress now enjoy. Recipients would be provided a list of options to choose from, with Medicare subsidizing part of the cost via a “premium-support model.”

∙ Reforming Social Security by building on proposals offered by the president’s bipartisan fiscal commission.

∙ Reforming welfare by targeting ways to get people off the government rolls and into jobs. His proposal would also modify how the federal government funds state Medicaid programs and fine tunes the food stamp program.

∙ Ending taxpayer support for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, eliminating congressional power to bail out companies, and putting the brakes on “expensive handouts for uncompetitive sources of energy.”

∙ Reforming the tax code and enforcing limits on how much the government spends.

Promising more details to follow later today, Ryan wrote, “We can reform government so that people don’t have to reorient their lives for less. We can grow our economy, promote opportunity, and encourage upward mobility. This budget is the new House majority’s answer to history’s call. It is now up to all of us to keep America exceptional.”