Those fake deficit hawks..

[stpioc]

II was among the reporters who took Ryan’s reboot seriously. “To move us to surpluses,” I wrote of his 2010 proposal, “Ryan’s budget proposes reforms that are nothing short of violent. Medicare is privatized. Seniors get a voucher to buy private insurance, and the voucher’s growth is far slower than the expected growth of health-care costs. Medicaid is also privatized. The employer tax exclusion is fully eliminated, replaced by a tax credit that grows more slowly than medical costs.”

I didn’t agree with Ryan’s policies, but at least he was making the trade-offs of his vision clear. Here was a Republican who said what he was going to do, who admitted his health care plan included “rationing,” who offered something specific to argue with. That was progress.

But to critics like the New York Times’s Paul Krugman, Ryan was an obvious con man weaponizing the deficit to hamstring Obama’s presidency, weaken the recovery, and snooker Beltway centrists eager to champion a reasonable-seeming Republican. Ryan, after all, had voted for Bush’s deficits — he was a yes on the tax cuts, on the wars, on Medicare Part D. He proposed a Social Security privatization scheme so pricey that even the Bush administration dismissed it as “irresponsible.”

And his budgets, for all the hard choices, didn’t actually add up. They included massive tax cuts with underestimated costs and unspecified financing — which is what led Krugman to call him a charlatan back in 2010. Ryan waved this away as nitpicking. ”If needed,” his office said, “adjustments can be easily made to the specified rates to hit the revenue targets.” But his critics predicted he would lose his appetite for hard choices the moment his party returned to power. He hadn’t changed; he had merely rebranded.

The numbers proved them right. Ryan was elected speaker of the House on October 29, 2015. Over the next three years, annual deficits increased by almost 80 percent. The added debt is Ryan’s legacy, not his circumstance. It is entirely attributable to policy choices he made..

Speaker Paul Ryan retires: his legacy is debt and disappointment - Vox