No shortage of opinion on Ryan's deficit plan

Any proposal to slash almost $6 trillion from the federal budget is likely to stir up some interest. Here's a sample of what I've seen this morning:

Democrats are within their rights to point out the negative effects of Ryan's proposed cuts on future retirees, working families, and the poor. He was not specific about many of his cuts, and Democrats have a political opportunity in filling in the blanks. But the ball is now in their court, and it will be hard to take them seriously if they don't respond with their own alternative path to debt reduction and long-term solvency. - Jacob Weisberg, Slate

Ryan is claiming that unemployment will plunge right away; that by 2015 it will be down to the levels at the peak of the 1990s boom (and far below anything achieved under the sainted Ronald Reagan); and that by 2021 it will be below 3 percent, a level we haven't seen in more than half a century. Right. - Paul Krugman, NYT

Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-WI) plan to cut the budget deficit makes some laughable assumptions and leaves many questions unanswered: Namely, where the $4.4 trillion of the $6.2 trillion of "savings" are going to come from. Ryan doesn't have the balls to actually specify these cuts: He just proposes capping federal spending at 20% of GDP. In the absence of specifics, saying that the plan will save $6.2 trillion over 10 years is misleading. But Ryan and the Republicans deserve a lot of credit for at least acknowledging the huge fiscal mess the United States is in and proposing specific long-term remedies for dealing with it. - Henry Blodget, Business Insider

Alas, his op-ed is needlessly partisan in its initial lashing out at Obama. That's not the way to start a real dialogue, which is what we desperately need. But the good news is that we finally have a political party being honest about what it takes to avoid falling off a fiscal cliff. It means sacrifice. And my objection to the Ryan plan really comes down to the injustice of imposing major sacrifices for the poor and elderly, while exempting the wealthy from any sacrifice at all. This is because of Ryan's and the GOP's intransigent, doctrinaire refusal to bring taxes back to their Clinton-era or Reagan-era levels, even as they have given themselves a great opportunity to raise revenues as painlessly as possible. - Andrew Sullivan, The Dish

Without question, Ryan makes some severe cuts: Taking hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid, ending the Medicare entitlement, and slashing planned spending on transportation, energy, education, veterans benefits, agriculture payments, counterterrorism and more. Yet for all these cuts, the Republicans' plan increases the federal debt by more than $8 trillion over the next 10 years, and it continues federal budget deficits until nearly 2040. Under the proposed balanced budget amendment to the Constitution that Ryan and his Republican colleagues claim to support, Ryan's budget wouldn't be in compliance for at least the next quarter century. - Dana Milbank, Washington Post

There is at least one big way in which the plan isn't daring at all. It asks for a whole lot of sacrifice from everyone under the age of 55 and little from everyone 55 and over. Representative Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican who wrote the plan, calls the budget deficit an "existential threat" to the United States. Then he absolves more than one-third of all adults from responsibility in dealing with that threat. This decision doesn't make him unique in Washington. There is nearly a bipartisan consensus that any cuts to Medicare and Social Security should spare the baby boomers and the elderly. And, certainly, retirees or people on the verge of retirement shouldn't have their benefits changed radically. But the consensus, like Mr. Ryan's plan, goes too far. - Dave Leonhardt, NYT