Paul Ryan Is One Of The Few In Washington Who Can Do Basic Math -- Or Is He?
Joseph Rago writes in the WSJ:

In 2008, amid the poverty of ambition of the late Bush presidency, Mr. Ryan released "A Roadmap for America's Future," a 71-page document that was the first plan in years to take arithmetic seriously. The then-obscure Wisconsin congressman dropped by the Journal to sell his vision, no press secretary, no handlers. "I want to be the Paul Revere of the fisc," he said, according to my notes from the meeting.

Mr. Ryan knew as everyone who knows the budget knows that the federal balance sheet can't be improved by zeroing out foreign aid to Mozambique and arts funding for off-off-off Broadway plays. Medicare is such a large share of spending, and growing so much faster than any other item, that fiscal reform must include the popular entitlement.

Yet the larger goal, Mr. Ryan wrote in the roadmap's preface, was to modernize Medicare for "the realities of the new century." His aim was "not to retreat from the commitments made over the past eight decades, but to fulfill them." In a word, to preserve retirement security and the social safety net.

The core problem is that open-ended Medicare, which spends one of five dollars in health care, buys services whose costs are rapidly increasing. It is a "defined benefit." Mr. Ryan wants to move to a "defined contribution," where seniors would get a fixed-dollar subsidy to buy private insurance. Seniors who desire more generous benefits would pay at the margin. This shift to "premium support," akin to the private-sector transition to 401(k)s from pensions, would change the incentives in health care and make medicine more accountable to patient choice.

Today, Medicare's arbitrary fee-for-service price controls pay the best hospitals and the worst hospitals equally, regardless of quality or value. Innovators who deliver better care at a lower cost are rarely rewarded, as they would be in any other industry. Under premium support, networks of providers would be competing for consumers and become more efficient over time, instead of billing taxpayers for their current negative rate of productivity.

Under the 2008 roadmap, seniors would get a straight cash voucher for $9,500 a year (the amount Medicare then spent per person), indexed to a blended measure of general inflation and the rise of health costs. The poorest and the sickest would get more, the wealthiest seniors less. Nothing would change for people older than 55.

Then again, pretty much everybody in government sucks, panders, and worse, and Ryan is no different, and let's not forget that. David McElroy blogs:

Mainstream political reporters are painting the selection of Ryan as a turn to the "radical right" to placate the Tea Party's supporters. A writer for Time magazine even said that Ryan was the choice of the "libertarians on the Wall Street Journal editorial board...." (I haven't run into any actual libertarians yet who are excited about Ryan.)

There's only one little problem with this narrative building him up as a fiscal conservative or even libertarian. Ryan's voting record is full of support for things that no fiscal conservative could support, much less a libertarian. Anybody who believes that his candidacy is a win for libertarians or fiscal conservatives isn't paying attention.

One of the most egregiously irresponsible spending measures of the last few years was the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which forced U.S. taxpayers to purchase the so-called "toxic assets" of big banks. Pure and simple, it was a bailout for banks to allow them to get loans off their books. Ryan not only voted for TARP, but he enthusiastically supported it. Take a look at the video from the House floor (at the end of this article) of Ryan begging the House to pass TARP and warning of dire consequences if it didn't pass. Is that a fiscal conservative?

Ryan voted for the auto bailout of General Motors and Chrysler. Is that a fiscal conservative?

He's voted for Medicare expansion, housing subsidies and extension of federal unemployment benefits. Are those things that actual fiscal conservative support?

In addition, he's voted in favor of a national ID, making the PATRIOT Act permanent, surveillance without a warrant and No Child Left Behind. He favored keeping troops in Iraq indefinitely. Maybe worst of all, he voted for the so-called "stimulus" plans of 2008 and 2009. That's right. Ryan believes in the voodoo economics of John Maynard Keynes. Is any of this the mark of a fiscal conservative, much less a libertarian?

The idea that Ryan is a fiscal conservative or libertarian is puzzling. The facts don't support the contention. (Read more about his record here.) So why are so many people saying it anyway?