The Fiscal Hypocrisy of Paul Ryan.

Here’s a piece form Ezra Klein that pretty much sums up the accounting genius, a carefully crafted myth, of Rep. Paul Ryan:

The occasion of Rep. Paul Ryan winning an award for fiscal responsibility has left a lot of people wondering where the Paul Ryan who seemed to care so much for fiscal responsibility has gone. In recent months, Ryan has refused to sign onto the fiscal commission's final report, voted for the tax deal that extended the Bush tax cuts (and some other tax cuts) at a cost of more than $800 billion to the deficit, and backed a series of new rules in the House that made it vastly easier to increase the deficit by cutting taxes and vastly harder to decrease it by raising them, and helped the GOP lift their own rules to try and repeal the health-care legislation without offsetting the increase that would mean for the deficit. Asked by NBC's Meredith Vieira to name a specific program he'd cut, Ryan dodged. "I can't tell you the answer to that because, as a budget committee person, we simply lower the cap and then those things go down," he said.

The less charitable interpretation is that as his prominence in the party has risen, he has morphed from a principled fiscal hawk to an old-school "starve the beast" Republican for whom lower taxes always trump deficit reduction. If you ask Ryan's office about this … "lower taxes always trump deficit reduction." Or at least they do in every situation Ryan has been confronted with so far.

The reality … Republicans -- led by Ryan -- could lower taxes, shrink the state and balance the budget all at the same time. They chose not to do that. All you see is a commitment to tax cuts, deficits be damned.

Since winning the election, the GOP -- with Ryan's support -- has increased budget deficits and policy uncertainty alike. They chose a temporary tax cut rather than a permanent one, and also sought the repeal of the health-care bill and a continuing resolution rather than real appropriations bills. All of that increased policy uncertainty. As for the deficit, the tax deal increased it by $850 billion. That's larger than any other single piece of legislation signed by Obama.

Ryan will point out that the real budget problem is health-care driven spending, and he's got a long-term plan to deal with that. People can argue about whether his Roadmap, which operates by the principle of "we simply lower the cap and then those things go down," will actually work. But fiscal responsibility isn't measured by what you want. It's measured by what you do.

The reality is that every Democrat who voted to cut Medicare by more than $500 billion and raise taxes by more than $400 billion in order to offset the cost of the health-care bill cast a tougher vote for fiscal responsibility than Ryan has. And Ryan, who voted for Medicare Part D without demanding that its spending be offset, has criticized them endlessly for it.