How dare someone in political life start talking about dealing with Medicare and Social Security.  Don't they know it's a third rail of American politics?  Am I right?

I wanted to do three things: fulfill the mission of health and retirement security -- I hardly would call this dismantling -- pay off the national debt, and put our economy in a position to be thriving and prosperous and internationally very competitive in the 21st century.

I meant by "dismantle", just dismantle in the traditional way that it works.  In other words, you can use the word "change" rather than dismantle.

OK, but are you prepared to spend money for stimulus in order to do something about unemployment?

I don't subscribe to the typical Keynesian doctrine that you need to borrow and spend money to create jobs.  We borrowed and spent $1.1 trillion (when you add interest costs) on the stimulus and we've lost 2.6 million jobs since that legislation passed.

I do think there are better things that the government could do to promote 
prosperity and create jobs. We ought to be growing at a very fast pace 
coming out of the kind of recession we are coming out of -- if we are 
coming out of it. I mean after the '81 and the ‘72 recessions we were 
growing at about six to eight percent at this time.

I would argue that the reason we are growing so slowly -- why jobs aren't 
materializing -- really is because of government in this case.  Government 
is producing so much uncertainty.  You have a wave of tax increases 
coming in January; another wave of tax increases coming in 2013.

You have all this spending, which is adding to our debt.  And we have a debt crisis right around the corner plus new regulations that are causing businesses to sit on capital and not hire employees.  You've got to reduce those threats to the economy, to businesses, and that will help us unlock the job growth in this country.

You said the regulatory certainty is established now that we have the financial reform.

 Of course, that legislation only created more uncertainty and inefficiency, and Ryan responded 
fittingly with polite laughter. Then he explained:

There are over 500 regulations that will come out of this new law that haven't been 
promulgated yet that nobody really knows what it is going to mean.  They haven't 
defined them. [By the way, that will take years]  We have a whole new health care 
law that many businesses don't really know exactly what the consequences of these 
things are.

So federal government has done a lot lately that I think are really putting a chilling effect on businesses.  When I travel through southern Wisconsin talking with businesses big and small, I get the same answer every time, which is, what is the government going to do to me next?

So the way I look at it is, it's not as if we have to go reinvent this country.  We
have to more or less reclaim it.  The ideas that built it are the ones that made it 
so exceptional in the first place.

What are those basic ideas?  I can get a little philosophical, but your rights come from god and nature, not from government.  Government's job is to protect your rights and build the society based on liberty, freedom, equality, free enterprise, self-determination, government by consent of the governed, really important principles.

I bet if Barack Obama was sitting at this table, he would say, "I agree with everything Paul Ryan just said."