Ryan attacks Obama, but GOP doesn’t have a ‘credible’ debt plan of its own

Stephen Stromberg, of the Washington Post, finds Paul Ryan has more than a small credibility gap when discussing Obama's budget position:

Paul Ryan, the GOP’s budget chief, tried to twist the knife in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, issuing a wide-ranging condemnation of President Obama in the midst of the Republicans’ debt-limit victory.

Here’s a key sentence: The president, he writes, “still hasn't put forward a credible plan to tackle the threat of ever-rising spending and debt, and his evasiveness is emblematic of the party he leads.”

Nearly every word of that applies to Ryan and his party, only arguably more so. The budget Ryan wrote and the GOP House passed would add $6 trillion to the debt over the next decade, despite its truly punitive cuts to domestic spending. Why? Because while Ryan would reform entitlement programs, one essential element in budget reform, he would also cut taxes steeply, exactly the opposite of what the budget math requires. The result is a plan that doesn’t balance the budget until 2030s, which Ryan euphemistically calls “[putting] the federal budget on the path to balance.”

Read it here.