The Seriousity Of Paul Ryan, Washington’s Most Principled Man of Principle

Being a prominent Republican means, among other things, that your self-descriptions always matter more than your actions:

Politico, reporting on Ryan’s meeting today with Trump, notes, “The speaker even brought charts and slides illustrating the nation’s budget woes to help Trump understand the problem he has spent 20 years trying to solve.”

In reality, Ryan’s record in public life supports a very different conclusion. Over the last two decades, he has supported all of the major deficit-increasing legislation: the Bush tax cuts, the Bush-era defense buildup, and Bush’s debt-financed Medicare drug benefit. During the Bush administration, Ryan distinguished himself from the president by demanding even larger tax cuts — and, during the fight over privatizing Social Security, advocated a plan that the administration rejected because it would have exploded deficits by too much. Likewise, Ryan has opposed all of the major deficit-reducing legislation during this period — ending portions of the Bush tax cuts, ending overpayments to private tuition lenders, and enacting the deficit-reducing Affordable Care Act, especially its cost-containment measures. Ryan also voted against the Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction framework, and torpedoed bipartisan efforts to negotiate a deficit-reduction compromise between the Obama administration and Congress.

To be Scrupulously Fair, the fact that Ryan doesn’t actually care about deficits led him to torpedo any Grand Bargain, so he will always have performed one valuable public service for the republic.