Zipping across the land with a nice internet connection, so a good time to reflect a bit (looking down on clouds from above broadens the perspective a bit, I find).

So, I’m doing a radio interview last night, and moderately impressed with myself for being able to speak coherently about four different budgets: Ryan’s, Senate’s, POTUS (not out yet, but we can guess at the mix), and the CPC. Then I got asked a question which threw me a bit: why are Paul Ryan and his budget taken so seriously?

It wasn’t a snarky question. It’s just that I’d been discussing the absolute non-reality of his proposal—how the numbers don’t begin to add up, the unrealistic budget cuts, the plethora of magic asterisks in the absence of actual proposals (the most egregious of which is: I’ll cuts taxes by $6-7 trillion over the next decade and offset the revenue losses with…um…sorry, gotta run). And the interviewer was like, “OK…but if you’re right, why is his budget front page news such that he’s driving the debate?”

Here’s what I think is going on. First, institutional reasons. His party holds the majority and he’s the chair of the House Budget Committee. That in itself makes his budget newsworthy. Also, as a former VP candidate, he’s a national figure.

But that’s not the main reason.

I asked a wise, intently non-partisan friend who thought, and he admitted he was being generous, that one reason might be that Ryan’s introduced an important theme into the discussion: if you want really low taxes, you’ve got to give up Medicare as we know it.

But while that may be in there somewhere, it’s awfully muddled. It certainly wasn’t Ryan’s position in the election, where he and Mitt attacked the President for Medicare cuts. And his voucher program doesn’t start for ten years.

In other words, I think my friend is being too generous. I’ve argued that we actually need our politicians to articulate this point: if we want X, we’re going to have to pay for X. To my ears, Paul Ryan actually fits squarely in the problematic camp on this point, telling folks they can painlessly have it all. But in his version, it takes the form of trickle down: if we cut taxes on job creators, get rid of the safety net, and inject health care delivery with competition, then we can have it all for a fraction of what we’re paying now.