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28 Republicans in Congress, he suggested, would shred that tradition under cover of a debate that is only nominally about the budget. “The fact is,” he said, “their vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America.” Conservatives would and did object to his implication of heartlessness, but not necessarily to his assessment of their ambition. The Republican plan put forward by Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the chairman of the Budget Committee, and adopted by the House on Friday as its policy blueprint for the next decade contains a substantial dose of deficit reduction but is really a manifesto for limited government. It would take big steps toward privatizing Medicare, slash upper- income tax rates, repeal last year’s health care law, bite deeply into nearly all federal programs and try to cap the size of government relative to the economy. But it also imposes a self-consciously moral judgment on the government’s role, suggesting that the same kind of demand for added personal responsibility that was embedded in the 1996 overhaul of welfare should now be applied more broadly, to food stamps, housing aid and health care for the elderly and the poor. “The safety net should never become a hammock, lulling able-bodied citizens into lives of complacency and dependency,” Mr. Ryan’s budget proposal says. William A. Galston, who was a domestic policy aide to President Bill Clinton and is now a scholar at the Brookings Institution, said Mr. Ryan deserved credit of a sort for addressing head-on the implications of the Republican Party’s increasingly rigid antitax posture, which since it took root in the late 1970s has put greater and greater pressure on budgets and the social programs they support. “It represents the first serious effort to begin to bring Republican social policy commitments in line with their fiscal and tax commitments,” Mr. Galston said. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023485