Mitt Romney seems to have touched the hearts of Republican conservatives and Tea Party types by selecting Congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate.
But here’s the thing about Ryan: his vaunted fiscal conservatism only seems to kick in when a Democrat happens to be president.
Ryan’s votes in Congress– along with those of other Republicans and some Democrats– helped turn the budget surplus that George W. Bush inherited from Bill Clinton in 2001 into the huge budget deficit that Barack Obama inherited from Bush in 2009.
While supporting Bush’s tax cuts, which cost $1.8 trillion in the first eight years, Ryan also voted for the president’s unfunded Medicare prescription drug program ($272 billion through 2011), as well as the hugely expensive and unfunded wars in Afghanistan and Iraq ($1.26 trillion through 2011).
(I supported those wars, but it was liberals like E.J. Dionne, rather than conservatives like Ryan, who dared to suggest that they be paid for by those who could best afford it.)
To his credit, Ryan supported the auto industry bailout and the TARP bank bailout. This earned him a rebuke from Michelle Malkin, who quite correctly denounced him for his “arbitrary and capricious commitment to fiscal conservatism.”
Ryan has engaged in some convoluted explanations for this that are worthy of comparison to John Kerry’s “I voted for the bill before I voted against it.”
“Madam Speaker, this bill [TARP] offends my principles, but I’m gonna vote for this bill in order to preserve my principles.”
Conservatives may also be unpleasantly surprised to learn that Ryan has routinely voted to uphold the Davis-Bacon act, which requires contractors to pay the locally prevailing wage on federally-funded construction, and which is strongly backed by organized labor. (I assume this has something to do with building trades unions being relatively strong in Ryan’s Wisconsin district.)
Ryan doesn’t seem to hate unions as much as Republicans generally do these days. While he supported Gov. Scott Walker’s assault on collective bargaining rights for public employees in Wisconsin, he has also said: “A lot of conservatives just think unions are nothing but bad. That’s just not true…. They’re people who are just trying to make their lives better, people trying to collectively negotiate a better standard of living for themselves. What the heck is wrong with that?”
What indeed? But don’t expect to hear this kind of talk from him on the campaign trail.
Update: And don’t buy into the belief that Ryan’s latest plan is in any meaningful sense fiscally conservative.
A fiscal conservative pays for the government he wants. Ryan never has. His early “Roadmap for America’s Future” didn’t balance the budget until the 2060s and added $60 trillion to the national debt. Ryan’s revised plan, passed by the House in 2011, wouldn’t reach balance until the 2030s while adding $14 trillion in debt. It adds $6 trillion in debt over the next decade alone — yet Republicans had the chutzpah to say they wouldn’t raise the debt limit!