The slash-and-burn veep candidate

Embracing Ryan, and His Budget Details

By JACKIE CALMES, NYT

WASHINGTON — To date, Mitt Romney has been criticized for the lack of detail behind his promise to reduce the nation’s rising debt through sweeping spending cuts and tax changes, but also politically insulated by it.

Now, his gamble in tapping as his running mate Representative Paul D. Ryan, the author of the audacious House Republican budget plan, changes all of that.

The budgets that Mr. Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, has pushed through the Republican-controlled House this year and last have defined nothing short of a conservative reordering of the nation’s tax and spending priorities for the 21st century. His blueprint would greatly shrink the government, largely undoing the social safety net by shifting more costs onto individuals and essentially converting Medicare into a capped voucher program. It also would adjust the progressive income-tax system, which, like the safety net, was built through the 20th century under Republican as well as Democratic presidents.

The Ryan budgets were predictably blocked by the Democratic-controlled Senate and President Obama. Yet should Mr. Romney win election, it is far from clear how a Romney-Ryan budget would fare even in a friendlier Congress, given the politically and fiscally fraught particulars that Mr. Ryan and his House Republican colleagues have proposed.

(More here.)