An exerpt from Matt Miller Opinion Writer for the WPost

This is exerpted from Matt Miller Opinion Writer for the Washington Post:

(fiscal) murder.
Ryan is not a “fiscal 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! (I remain mystified why President Obama never hammered home this reckless contradiction by insisting that the GOP “raise the debt ceiling just by the amount it would take to accommodate the debt in Paul Ryan’s budget.”)
Ryan is an extreme “small government conservative.” Ronald Reagan ran government at 22 percent of gross domestic product when our population was much younger. Ryan and Romney want to run government at 20 percent of GDP even as the number of Americans on Social Security and Medicare doubles. Even if we slow these programs’ growth, it’s impossible to shrink the federal role in an aging society this sharply without eliminating vast swaths of what Americans have come to expect from government — not to mention shortchanging already lagging investments in research and development and infrastructure. Over time, Ryan’s “vision” would decimate most federal activities beyond Social Security, Medicare and defense.
When I asked Ryan last October why he thought — in his words — “the historic size [of government as a share of GDP], or smaller,” was sound policy when we’d shortly be doubling the number of seniors on the biggest federal programs, he replied, “Because we can’t keep doing everything for everybody in this country.”
Ryan says that on our current path we will “transform our social safety net into a hammock, which lulls able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency.” But I’ve never understood what hammock Ryan is talking about. If programs for seniors haven’t been a “hammock” until now, simply doubling the number of people eligible for them can’t turn them into a “hammock” tomorrow. We have an aging population challenge and a health-cost challenge. We don’t have a “hammock” challenge.
Ryan is not a truthteller. Ryan boasted on Saturday that he and Romney have “the courage to tell you the truth.” But political courage means telling your base things they don’t want to hear. The truth Ryan and Romney won’t tell — which explains the staggering debt in Ryan’s plan — is that taxes need to rise as the boomers retire. (The truth Democrats won’t tell is that raising taxes on the rich alone won’t suffice.)