http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/05/26-5
Published on Thursday, May 26, 2011 by Raw Story
by Sahil Kapur
Former vice president Dick Cheney heaped praise on House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), author of the GOP’s budget blueprint to phase out Medicare and replace it with a subsidies system for seniors to buy private insurance.
“I worship the ground the Paul Ryan walks on,” Cheney said Wednesday at a Houston event hosted by the KPMG Global Energy Institute. “I think he’s an enormously talented individual and he’s trying to do the right thing. And he deserves the support, all the support we can provide him.”
“We need to get serious about dealing with [our] debt problem,” the former vice president explained.
Most of the government’s $14.3 trillion debt is a result of Bush-era policies, such as tax cuts for the wealthy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Cheney’s concern for the deficit appears to be relatively new. He famously said in 2004, “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter,” according to President Bush’s first Treasury Secretary Paul H. O’Neill.
Watch the video, clipped by ThinkProgress.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siYAdl5hvJI&feature=player_embedded