Sen. Chuck Schumer has got the fiscal message on Paul Ryan: "[A]t least in terms of deficit reduction, the Ryan plan is a fraud," the New York Democrat wrote in a memo addressed to other Senate Democrats.
Most significantly:
1. He supported the Bush policies that got us into this deep fiscal hole in the first place. From the Bush tax cuts to two unfunded wars to the unpaid-for creation of Medicare Part D, Ryan’s fingerprints are all over the big-spending, Bush policies that turned Bill Clinton’s record surpluses into the record deficits inherited by Barack Obama. [...]
4. Most importantly, as already mentioned, the math does not add up in Ryan’s own budget. Even taking the unrealistically rosy assumptions that Ryan stipulates in his budget (for instance, that revenue levels would be 19 percent of GDP), his plan would not balance the budget until 2040. Independent experts like the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center have challenged these assumptions. Under more realistic assumptions, Ryan’s plan could take far longer to balance the budget and cause the federal debt to rise even higher.
It's not like Schumer's coming from the far left with this, either. He also assails Ryan for having voted against the Simpson-Bowles plan from his seat on the Catfood Commission. While a vote against that atrocity is no bad thing, Ryan, of course, voted against it because it wasn't atrocious enough, so Schumer has a point on that one even if he starts from an obnoxious place. And this is the right message. Paul Ryan's Beltway media-bestowed credentials as a serious policy person have never stood up to scrutiny. It's time for that scrutiny to be applied.
So: Paul Ryan is a fraud. Repeat it. Paul Ryan is a fraud. Sing it. When all someone's deficit talk adds up to is "cut services and raise taxes for people who aren't rich," the term is deficit peacock, not deficit hawk.