by Patrick Appel and Gwynn Guilford
Over the weekend, William Saletan hailed the Ryan nomination as a victory for "real fiscal conservatives." Money quote:
Ryan understands that the longer we ignore the debt crisis and postpone serious budget cuts—the liberal equivalent of denying global warming—the more painful the reckoning will be.
Paul Krugman lights into Saletan and, more generally, the "self-proclaimed centrists, who want to show their 'balance' by finding a conservative to praise":
What [Saletan is] doing – and what the whole Beltway media crowd has done – is to slot Ryan into a role…of the thoughtful, serious conservative wonk. In reality, Ryan is nothing like that; he’s a hard-core conservative, with a voting record as far right as Michelle Bachman’s, who has shown no competence at all on the numbers thing. What Ryan is good at is exploiting the willful gullibility of the Beltway media, using a soft-focus style to play into their desire to have a conservative wonk they can say nice things about. And apparently the trick still works.
Fallows cautions against journalistic tropes commonly associated with Ryan:
One request: I hope that when reporters are writing or talking about Paul Ryan's budget plans and his overall approach, they will rig up some electro-shock device to zap themselves each time they say that Ryan and his thoughts are unusually "serious" or "brave." Clear-edged they are, and useful in defining the issues in the campaign. But they have no edge in "seriousness" over, say, proposals from Ryan's VP counterpart Joe Biden.
Ryan's soundbites and the media "cliche machine" obscure the deficit-growing specifics of his policies, argues Tomasky:
Ryan from time to time inveighs against deficits, and so he is unveiled to the American people, as The New York Times did over the weekend, as "intent on erasing deficits."As Matt Miller notes in The Washington Post, this is absurd and so indefensibly lazy as to defy comprehension. He would balance the budget in around 2040. What Ryan is actually "intent" on doing is slashing domestic spending to the bone and, most of all, giving massive tax breaks to rich people. This is the inescapable objective truth, if you've actually studied his plan.
Suzy Khimm underscores that point with the chart above from the CBPP:
[T]he Ryan and Romney tax plans are cut from the same cloth: They both give big tax breaks to the wealthy without saying how they’d be offset. But Ryan’s plan makes the tax break for top incomes even bigger.
Ezra Klein looks at Ryan's spending-cut specifics:
The truth is that the Ryan budget’s largest long-term savings don’t come from Medicaid or Medicare or Social Security, or even Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security put together. They come from everything else. Ryan says that under his budget, everything the federal government does that is not Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security will be cut to less than 3.75 percent of GDP by 2050. That means defense, infrastructure, education, food safety, energy research, national parks, civil service, the FBI — all of it. Right now, that category of spending is 12.5 percent of GDP.
The Dish 
