Benjy Sarlin May 18, 2011, 12:23 PM

After treading lightly around his plan to cut and privatize Medicare in a speech Monday, Paul Ryan doubled down on the proposal Wednesday in an op-ed for the Christian Science Monitor.

While the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office concludes that Ryan’s plan would achieve its savings by forcing seniors to pay thousands of dollars more in medical costs within a decade of its passage, Ryan claimed that those “demonizing” his budget as a blow to the safety net have it all wrong.

“This rhetoric is not just overheated - it is flat-out false,” he wrote. “Our budget - “The Path to Prosperity” - strengthens the safety net by directing more assistance to those who need it most. It provides the chronically unemployed with the incentives and tools they need to bounce back into self-sufficient lives. Most important, it prevents the kind of debt-fueled economic crisis that would hit the poor the hardest.”

It’s the second time this week that Ryan claimed that his plan actually “strengthens the safety net” and appears to reflect the political reality that cuts to benefits are toxic in polling even when framed as necessary to reduce the deficit.

Ryan favorably compared his own budget to President Clinton’s in 1996, which included a welfare reform law negotiated with the Republican House. According to Ryan, the booming economy of the next several years is evidence that his budget would produce similar results by restricting aid to the poor.

“Despite this unprecedented success, the defenders of the status quo in Washington are at it again, demonizing the House-passed budget in the same overwrought language they used to attack the bipartisan welfare reforms of the mid-1990s,” Ryan wrote.

Bill Clinton, Medicare, Path to Prosperity, Paul Ryan