During a segment decrying Washington's inability to solve the nation's problems, Fox News' Glenn Beck praised Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) for being “actually consistent” on the deficit. “Paul Ryan is one of the good guys, I think,” Beck added.

But as The Economist's Greg Ip points out, Ryan has some “work to do” to live up to the fiscal responsibility award (The Fiscy) he was recently given by budget hawks. From Ip's January 7 post:

Like Mr Conrad, Mr Ryan was a member of the Bowles-Simpson commission. Unlike Mr Conrad, he voted against its plan to stabilise the debt despite calling it “serious and credible”. He opposed it because it left Mr Obama's health-care reform intact, and because it relied too much on tax increases, even though these were smaller than the plan's spending cuts. The opposition by Mr Ryan and his two fellow House Republicans more or less guaranteed the plan would die.

A few days later Mr Ryan congratulated Mr Obama for acting “responsibly” in capitulating to Republicans and agreeing to an $800 billion-plus package that extends all of George Bush's tax cuts and implements new temporary stimulus composed overwhelmingly of tax cuts. Whatever its merits as stimulus, its complete absence of any linkage to long-term deficit reduction is antithetical to the principals behind the Fiscy.

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But the most important reason to question Mr Ryan's deficit-hawk credentials was his support for certain changes to the budget process to constrain spending.

Specifically, “Paygo”, the current rule that requires any cut in taxes or increase in spending be offset by equivalent tax increases or spending cuts elsewhere in the budget, will be replaced with “Cutgo”, which imposes that requirement only on spending. The new rules could actually weaken rather than strengthen, deficit reduction; so says none other than the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget:

[T]he additional focus on both short and long-term spending is a plus, but in many cases these rules focus on spending reductions at the expense of deficit reduction... Replacing the two sided PAYGO rule with a one-sided CUTGO rule will not only make it harder to offset legislation, but also exempt potentially budget-busting tax cuts from any discipline. The one-sided focus on spending also could result in the further proliferation of tax expenditures. As the Bowles-Simpson commission has highlighted, tax expenditures are simply spending by another name and should not be exempt from scrutiny.

Likewise, in a January 10 blog post, The Washington Post's Ezra Klein wrote:

Since winning the election, the GOP -- with Ryan's support -- has increased budget deficits and policy uncertainty alike. They chose a temporary tax cut rather than a permanent one, and also sought the repeal of the health-care bill and a continuing resolution rather than real appropriations bills. All of that increased policy uncertainty. As for the deficit, the tax deal increased it by $850 billion. That's larger than any other single piece of legislation signed by Obama.

Ryan will point out that the real budget problem is health-care driven spending, and he's got a long-term plan to deal with that. People can argue about whether his Roadmap, which operates by the principle of “we simply lower the cap and then those things go down,” will actually work. But fiscal responsibility isn't measured by what you want. It's measured by what you do. The reality is that every Democrat who voted to cut Medicare by more than $500 billion and raise taxes by more than $400 billion in order to offset the cost of the health-care bill cast a tougher vote for fiscal responsibility than Ryan has. And Ryan, who voted for Medicare Part D without demanding that its spending be offset, has criticized them endlessly for it.

From the January 12 edition of Fox News' Glenn Beck: