by Patrick Appel
Fred Kaplan chides the Paul Ryan plan for leaving defense spending uncut:
In an era when we face no foes of remotely comparable military power, how could it be that we need to spend roughly as much money as we spent when the Soviet Union was still alive, the Cold War was heating up, the border between East and West Germany was an armed garrison, and the nuclear arms race was spiraling upward? Yes, we face foes today, but they don’t confront us with echelons of tanks, armadas of fighter-bombers, or giant aircraft carriers fronting vast blue-water navies—nor do the threats they pose require the deployment of such big-ticket items to the extent that they once did.
James Surowiecki is equally unforgiving:
The budget is, as many have said, an act of political theatre, a way for Republicans to demonstrate what they stand for. But that’s precisely what makes it so revealing: what Ryan is proffering here is something like the platonic ideal of a budget. And what his plans tell us is that there’s very little the federal government has done over the past hundred and fifty years, apart from fighting wars, that the House Republicans approve of. In that sense, the Ryan plan is not about fiscal responsibility. It’s about pushing a very particular, and very ideological, view of the proper relationship between government and society. The U.S. does need to get its finances in order. It just doesn’t need to repeal the twentieth century to do so.
Reihan, on the other hand, mostly defends Ryan's plan:
Critics of Ryanism see cuts in federal expenditures for programs devoted to aiding the non-elderly poor as an attack on the non-elderly poor; what they fail to understand is that maintaining or increasing current levels of spending on programs devoted to aiding the non-elderly poor isn’t necessarily the best, and is certainly not the only imaginable, strategy for encouraging upward absolute mobility.
Will Wilkinson would welcome a Ryan-Obama face-off:
Unfortunately for Mr Obama, Mr Ryan is no Newt Gingrich. He is not a pompous, self-aggrandizing bloviator in the grand southern style. He's a likeable, hardworking, detail-oriented, Midwestern wonk who just happens to be something of a looker. Moreover, Mr Ryan's conservatism largely eschews the odious cultural politics of social conservatives and focuses instead on a pragmatic, fiscally conservative market-oriented meliorism, the appeal of which is by no means limited to the hard right. He's an attractive politician offering an attractive comprehensive alternative to the administration's approach. And that's why it is a matter of urgent political necessity for Mr Obama to try to smear Mr Ryan's budget as a recipe for brutal, devil-take-the-hindmost injustice.
The Dish 