Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog claims House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan deserves three Pinocchios (that stands for a “significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions”) for his response to the credit downgrade by Standard & Poor’s.
Here’s what Ryan said this week on Fox News Sunday to host Chris Wallace: “It’s because Washington has not gotten its fiscal house in order. To me, this is just more vindication of our action. We passed a budget which, according to somebody from S&P yesterday, would have prevented this downgrade from happening in the first place.”
Kessler argues that most viewers would hear Ryan’s claim on Sunday and think that S&P endorsed the House Republican budget. Since S&P isn’t endorsing any particular plans, Ryan must be making a “significant factual error.” Here’s Kessler:
So how does Ryan make this claim?
But as Kessler later points out, a Ryan spokesman offered a statement from S&P official John Chambers on Saturday. “If you get to $4 trillion mentioned by the president in an April 13 speech, by the Bowles-Simpson commission and by Congressman Paul Ryan, that along with economic growth would’ve done the trick,” Chambers told Fox News’s Neil Cavuto. That would seem to back up Ryan’s statement, that the House-passed budget would have prevented a downgrade from S&P. (Chambers, however, also mentions that the U.S. would have also needed economic growth, which has been modest at best and anemic at worst over the last several quarters.)
In fact, the Ryan-authored budget cut $6 trillion over the next ten years, $2 trillion more than the $4 trillion that Chambers says would have been necessary to avoid downgrading. Furthermore, President Obama may have claimed his “budget framework” would reduce the deficit by $4 trillion in his April 13 speech, but as CBO director Douglas Elmendorf has said, the CBO doesn’t score speeches. Obama has yet to put forth an actual plan to reduce the deficit, so it’s only by his word that his “plan” would cut the deficit by the S&P-endorsed amount of $4 trillion.
Still, it doesn’t matter, as Kessler says it does, that Chambers mentioned the Obama speech in addition to the Bowles-Simpson and the Ryan plans. Ryan never said that S&P claimed that the House Republican budget and only the House Republican budget would have prevented the downgrade. What Ryan has done is argue that his budget is the only one that addresses the fundamental problem with the federal budget: the spiraling cost of entitlements.
