I’ve been want to post this article, and now I’m going to do so:

Paul Ryan vs. the Mythmakers

Ramesh Ponnuru

If you’ve been following the debate over the House Republican budget proposed by Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan, you have probably heard that it savagely cuts programs for the poor in order to fund tax cuts for the rich, that its numbers don’t add up, and that in the short run it expands the deficits. These claims, though asserted confidently, either depend on highly contestable assumptions or are demonstrably untrue.

• David Frum writes in The Week that Ryan’s “debt reduction plan actually increases the debt over the medium term — by even more [than] President Obama’s budget would.”

The CBO’s actual projections for the Ryan plan show a debt level in 2021 that is $4.7 trillion lower than its projections for Obama’s budgets. Ryan’s plan is designed to rapidly stabilize federal debt as a share of the economy: That percentage peaks in year three and then starts falling. The CBO projections for Obama’s budgets just show the number rising higher and higher over the decade.

•“In fact, the [Congressional Budget Office] finds that over the next decade the [Ryan] plan would lead to bigger deficits and more debt than current law,” writes Paul Krugman in the New York Times.

What Krugman doesn’t mention is that current law includes automatic tax increases, including middle-class tax increases that both parties have consistently said they want to avoid. Current law includes cuts in payments to Medicare providers that both parties oppose and have acted against in the past. It includes the expansion of the Alternative Minimum Tax to hit more and more middle-class taxpayers, which — well, you get the idea. Krugman is comparing the Ryan plan with an alternative that is both unrealistic and much more painful than he lets on.