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President Obama said thatRepublicans' "vision is less aboutreducing the deficit than it is aboutchanging the basic social compact inAmerica.”

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House Approves RepublicanBudget Plan to Cut Trillions (April16, 2011)

The Budget Debate, RevealedBy RICHARD W. STEVENSONPublished: April 16, 2011

WASHINGTON — The air in the capital these days is thick with

references to trillion-dollar deficits, debt-to-G.D.P. ratios and

mandatory spending. But the budget debate that became fully

engaged last week is about far more than accounting and arcane

policy disputes. What is under way now is the most fundamental

reassessment of the size and role of government — of the balance

between personal responsibility and private markets on the one hand

and public responsibility and social welfare on the other — at least

since Ronald Reagan and perhaps since F.D.R.

The battle ahead “is the big one, and

goes to the very major questions about

the role of government,” said G. William Hoagland, a

former Republican staff director of the Senate Budget

Committee. “This is going to be a very fundamental clash of

ideologies.”

The Democratic and Republican Parties have their own

internal tensions to address as the debate goes forward in

Congress and on the presidential campaign trail. But in its

early stages at least, it is liberals who are on the defensive.

The aging of the baby boom generation and the costs of

maintaining Medicare and Social Security have put the two

pillars of the social welfare system on the table for

re-examination. The growing weight of the national debt

has given urgency to the question of whether the

government has become too big and expensive.

The tepid nature of the current economic recovery,

following big stimulus packages, has provided an opening

to challenge the effectiveness of Keynesianism as the

default policy option for government. And the revived

energy of grass-roots conservatives has given electoral clout

to the movement’s intellectual and constitutional

arguments.

Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise

Institute, the conservative research organization, said, “The

optimistic view is that we have a confluence of the business

cycle, of the demography and of the politics that makes it

not just possible to achieve real change, but impossible that

we not deal with these things if we want this country to

continue on the path envisioned by the founders.” So just

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FiveThirtyEight: The High Stakesof Republicans' Budget Vote (April15, 2011)

House Republicans Propose $4Trillion in Cuts Over Decade (April4, 2011)

two and a half years after a presidential election that was in

part a repudiation of conservative governance, and with the

nation still smarting from the aftereffects of a financial

crisis that grew out of failures of markets and regulation,

President Obama finds himself in a somewhat surprising

position: forced to articulate and sell a vision of how

liberalism and the institutions it built in the 20th century can be updated for the

constraints of the 21st.

The speech he delivered Wednesday at George Washington University in Washington was

his most ambitious effort so far to do so. In it, he harnessed the language of both left and

right to argue against the extremes on both sides while suggesting that many of their core

principles were not mutually exclusive — in other words, that Great Society values can

endure in a Tea Party moment.

He defined “patriotism” as a shared sense of responsibility for the vulnerable and less

fortunate. Basic standards of security for the elderly and poor and government investment

in a more prosperous future, he said, can not only coexist with a tradition of “rugged

individualists with a healthy skepticism of too much government,” but are also a vital part

of what makes America exceptional.

“We are a better country because of these commitments,” he said. “I’ll go further — we

would not be a great country without those commitments.”

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.

But he said Democrats, too, faced a credibility test. “They have held fast to the security

programs in place since the 1930s, but without being able to successfully challenge the

antitax orthodoxy,” he said. “The problem the Democrats have is that they can no longer

say with a straight face that raising taxes on the wealthy is going to enable them to pay

over the next generation for the programs they cherish. So what do you do?”

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A version of this article appeared in print on April 17, 2011, on pageWK1 of the New York edition.

That question is being asked quietly within both parties, each of which faces its own

internal tensions about how to proceed.

There are Republicans who fear that voting for the Ryan plan will put them out of step

with their constituents. There are Democrats who think the tax-and-spend label is all too

accurate. There are Republicans who might countenance voting for tax increases, and

there are Democrats who are willing to meaningfully scale back the benefits promised by

Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

In the Senate, a group of Democrats and Republicans operating independently of party

leaders is trying to come up with a plan that neither party would like but both would

accept as necessary. But they are debating basic values; it would no doubt be much easier

if the argument was just about numbers.

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