In the wake of Mitt Romney selecting Paul Ryan as his running mate, we are reposting this article from Glenn's interview with Paul Ryan in April 2011:

Glenn interviews the $6 trillion dollar man

Rep. Paul Ryan has been all over the news today, but he took time out of his busy schedule to speak with Glenn about his proposed budget which seeks to cut close to $6 Trillion from the federal budget over the next ten years. Glenn welcomed Rep. Paul Ryan in the third hour of today’s radio show.

Glenn was quick to thank Rep. Ryan for proposing a budget that would attempt to make some real changes. “When Congress was going back and forth with, oh, should it be 60 billion or 40 billion I was losing my mind,” Glenn said.

“We were talking about the trillions and here you come, riding in on your white horse to give us a plan that has a chance of saving our country. Thank you for that, sir,” he told Rep. Ryan.

“You’re welcome. It’s what I owe you, my children, my constituents. We owe this to our country,” Rep. Ryan said. “Our whole budget committee, you know, half of which are new freshmen, we decided, look, we’re just going to fix this. We’re going to go after these programs, after these drivers of our debt and, you know, we rolled up our sleeves on the worked for the last two months, you know, and working with the CBO and all these other actuaries to put in place a plan that cut $6.2 trillion out of the Obama budget over the next 10 years and get this debt on a path to actually be paid off.”

You can read Rep. Ryan’s article on the GOP Path to Prosperity here.

Rep. Ryan broke down some of the major components of the proposed budget. ‘We’re going after corporate welfare which means Fannie and Freddie, getting rid of Dodd-Frank and all the bailout funds, going after actual the energy green pork.”

Part of cutting out corporate welfare means that Rep. Ryan will be going after Fannie and Freddie Mac. But Glenn wanted to know what that meant for the average American as those two organizations have control over most of the loans that have been written in the past year.

“It means we’re going to get the private sector to do the secondary mortgage market, not the government. We’re going to put private capital at risk for securing mortgages, not taxpayer capital,” Ryan said.

But Ryan said that there plan goes beyond just Fannie and Freddie, as they will also focus heavily on welfare reform and entitlement programs. “We want to finish with reform now so they work. Food stamps have grown fourfold. We’re reducing that. We’re sending it back to the states and we’re having time limits and work requirements so we can get people into a system where they don’t become complacent and dependent on government but they get up on their lives and lives of sufficiency.”

“We’re talking about shrinking the Federal workforce by 10% over the next three years through attrition, pay freezes in the Federal workforce. We’re talking about cutting discretion spending on government agencies below 2008 levels. We’re talking about entitlement reform, block running Medicaid to the states, and doing welfare reform 2.0 which is food stamps, housing programs,” Rep. Ryan said.

Ryan said that he wants to shrink the federal government down from the historic size that it has reached and reform the system so people do not become complacent and dependant on big government.

“This is not the role of Federal Government. We want to get the government out of the role of picking winners and losers, out of the role of trying to micromanage the economy, and back toward a traditional Constitutional role which is to protect our natural rights,” he said.

But how will Rep. Ryan stand up to the inevitable criticism from the left? “They’re going to say that you’re offering tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, blah, blah, blah. You’re taking money out of the mouths of children. They’re going to hit you with all that stuff that we can’t afford this and that this is reckless and extreme. How are you going to combat that?” Pat wondered.

“I think the country is ahead of the political class up here in Washington. I think they’re ready to be spoken to like adults. They want that honest conversation,” Rep. Ryan said.

“You know the path we’re on. We go to becoming a cradle-to-the-grave welfare state. The size and scope of the Federal Government will be unrecognizable if we stay in our current path,” Ryan said.