Paul Ryan to promise leadership on ‘tough issues’ at GOP convention

TAMPA, Fla. -- Rep. Paul D. Ryan will reprise the budget-focused pledges that brought him to fame within his party, promising leadership on “tough issues” Wednesday night as he accepts his party’s vice presidential nomination, according to excerpts of his prepared remarks.

“Before the math and the momentum overwhelm us all, we are going to solve this nation’s economic problems,” the speech says. “We don’t have that much time. But if we are serious, and smart, and we lead, we can do this.”

“Here is our pledge: We will not duck the tough issues – we will lead.”

The speech before a prime-time audience will introduce Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin and the House Budget Committee chairman, to many voters. Despite his star status among Republicans in Washington, polls indicate that large numbers of voters still have little sense of him. In the prepared remarks, he also reprised two central Republican campaign pledges: to repeal the Obama administration’s healthcare law and to generate 12 million new jobs over the next four years.

The language on the budget will be familiar to those who have followed Ryan in recent years, as it repeats the sometimes apocalyptic warnings that have accompanied his budget plans. He often has said that the U.S. risks economic disaster if the government fails to dramatically curb its spending and reduce the national debt.

Those warnings have made him a leading figure in the Republican Party and the intellectual leader of its congressional wing.

But Ryan’s calls to balance the budget carry considerable risk for him as well. His own budget plan, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, would not balance for at least 28 more years, keeping the federal budget in the red until Mitt Romney is in his early 90s. Even that would happen only if Ryan could find some $5 trillion in new revenue to offset large new tax cuts that his budget includes. In the two years since he announced the plan, he has not specified what any of those new taxes would be.

Romney, the party’s presidential nominee, has offered a similar budget plan, also including large new tax cuts and also promising to find unspecified offsets for them.

In the hours leading up to his speech, Democrats were already making the case that those budget plans would harm the middle class in order to provide new tax cuts. “The fundamental choice they make with the Romney-Ryan budget is another round of windfall tax cuts for the very wealthy -- for people like Mitt Romney -- at the expense of everything and everyone else,” Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, Ryan’s Democratic counterpart on the budget committee, told reporters Wednesday.

david.lauter@latimes.com

Twitter: @DavidLauter