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Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, announced Ryan, a Wisconsin congressman, as his running mate on Saturday. Ryan has led the Republican Party's charge to shrink the size of government, including cutting spending on welfare, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, while slashing taxes for the wealthiest.
Krugman wrote in another blog post published on Monday afternoon that Romney chose Ryan in order to dupe the media into making "Ryan's unjustified reputation for honest wonkery...transfer to the ticket as a whole."
Ryan has been praised as a deficit hawk, but his budget proposal would raise $2.2 trillion less in tax revenue over the next 10 years than President Obama's budget, according to the Washington Post's Brad Plumer. To offset that lost revenue, Ryan also has proposed spending $5.3 trillion less over the same time period, but has not specified exact cuts.
Ryan's budget would slash all federal spending -- outside of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security -- by 70 percent by 2050, perhaps an unrealistic assumption considering that Romney has promised to keep defense spending above those levels, according to Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein.
Ryan also has proposed cutting individual and corporate tax rates and getting rid of taxes on corporate income, capital gains, estates, interest and dividends, according to Bloomberg. Ryan's budget proposal also promised to close tax loopholes, but declined to specify which ones.
Ryan's budget is generous to the wealthiest Americans. Romney, for example, would have paid an effective 0.82 percent tax rate in 2010 under Ryan's budget, thanks to the elimination of the tax on capital gains, the Atlantic's Matthew O'Brien notes. The Huffington Post
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