(Image modified from original photo by Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)





(Image modified from original photo by Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

As you may know, the Democratic debt ceiling plan contains $1 trillion in savings from ending the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Republicans have called that a gimmick, and Paul Ryan is particularly pissed off because Democrats are pointing out that his own budget plan (the one that ended Medicare) contains the exact same $1 trillion in savings.

According to Ryan, his plan never included this savings, but that's a lie, and a document he just released proves it. When Ryan released his plan, he claimed it would cut either $5.8 or $6.2 trillion, depending which baseline fiscal scenario you compared it against. According to his own proposal, his plan would cut "$6.2 trillion in government spending over the next decade compared to the president’s budget, and $5.8 trillion relative to the current-policy baseline."

The relevant figure is $5.8 trillion—that's the number that reflected what Ryan's plan would cut relative to current actual policy. (The $6.2 trillion number compared Ryan's budget to an outdated proposal from President Obama that never did and never will become law.)

If you look at chart S-4 of the document provided by Ryan's staff, you'll see that his $5.8 trillion spending cut includes $1 trillion in savings from the global war on terror—ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Because the outdated budget proposed by President Obama already took those savings into account, Ryan's budget didn't deliver any additional savings relative.)

If Paul Ryan and the Republican Party had used the standard they expect Democrats to use now, they'd have claimed $4.8 trillion in savings relative to current policy. Instead, they claimed either $5.8 or $6.2 trillion, depending on the fiscal scenario they used. In both cases, the amount of money spent by the Ryan plan was exactly the same; it was only the comparison that changed.

Now they not only expect Democrats to play by different rules, they are lying about how they played it the last time around.