He mentioned the budget, entitlements, defense spending.
And the Republicans on Capitol Hill who were supposed to cut spending exempted from the knife most of the domestic budget — entitlements, farm subsidies, education, water projects.
Second, there has been concern that the transparency which was supposed to be a key element of the move to personal budgets has been compromised by the adoption of opaque Resource Allocation Systems (RAS) to calculate budget entitlements.
Both he and they suggest that long-untouchable portions of the budget, like entitlements and defense, must be reduced; both he and they describe the multitrillion-dollar debt as an existential threat to future generations.
It is separate from the much bigger and faster-growing share of the budget for entitlement programs, the largest of which are Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
From the Huffington Post's Jon Ward: … when I asked [Matt] Rhoades in July how Romney would govern if elected, and what Romney might do with the budget and entitlement reform plans Ryan had already outlined, Rhoades' eyes lit up.
Since Mr. Romney is reluctant to put tax increases on the table to pay for the spending increase, she said, there would have to be "draconian" cuts to the rest of the federal budget, including entitlement programs.
Republicans hope that with Mr. Ryan leading the charge, Washington will finally grapple with the true drivers of the federal budget deficit: entitlement programs like Medicare that are swelling as the population ages.
Boomers invented youth, made "parent" a status verb, cast profligate middle age as "reinvention" and will sully their senior years in budget-busting entitlements, all while dressed like 5-year-olds.
So budget deficits, entitlement reform, and all that simply don't deserve to be policy priorities, let alone dominate the national discussion the way they did for the past few years.
… The idea of a one-term presidency became something of a theme in my conversations with Romney advisers in July … Multiple senior Romney advisers assured me that they had had conversations with the candidate in which he conveyed a depth of conviction about the need to try to enact something like Ryan's controversial budget and entitlement reforms.
