Greg Ip calls out Paul Ryan:
What should be made of Mr Ryan’s rhetoric? The charitable interpretation is that he is pursuing a more patient strategy of adhering to the party line until Democrats cave on entitlements, and then he will put tax increases on the table. The less charitable interpretation is that as his prominence in the party has risen, he has morphed from a principled fiscal hawk to an old-school "starve the beast" Republican for whom lower taxes always trump deficit reduction. Deficit hawks earn their feathers by championing balanced budgets even when it crosses its own party's priorities; by that standard, Mr Ryan has work to do.
Ezra Klein follows up:
If you ask Ryan's office about this, you'll get an answer that sounds, at least to me, a lot like Ip's less charitable interpretation. Ryan's position is that fiscal responsibility is about more than deficit arithmetic. If government gets bigger, that's bad for the economy, too, even if it gets bigger while balancing revenues against spending. In other words, "lower taxes always trump deficit reduction." Or at least they do in every situation Ryan has been confronted with so far.
My take here. I really wish Ryan were George Osborne.