I suppose that the selection of Paul Ryan as the Vice Presidential nominee on the Republican ticket makes my job a lot easier. I’ve written plenty about Ryan and his signature proposal, a budget roadmap that would end Medicare as we know it , block grant Medicaid, add private accounts to Social Security , take a hatchet in particular to pretty much all social insurance programs for the poor (in fact, he has moderated the most unpopular parts of his proposal over the years, the Medicare and Social Security changes, and made up for it with ramping up the cuts to anti-poverty programs), cut taxes on the rich and raise them on the middle class , and basically radically transform the 21st-century model of government in principles that can be best described as close to Ayn Rand, Ryan’s intellectual hero. House Republicans have voted for this budget twice, and Grover Norquist famously said at CPAC this year that all they need in the White House is someone with enough digits to hold a pen to sign it. Now, with a Romney win, they’ll have the architect of that budget in the White House looking over his shoulder. This cements the fact that the entire intellectual and political energy in the Republican Party comes out of the House Republican caucus, and nowhere else (it’s fitting that Ryan will still run for his House seat while running for VP). The Young Guns run the show, evidenced by one of their own making a major-party ticket.

And yet I take away two things. First of all, I completely agree that this selection means that jobs and the economy will actually get shunted to the side of the political debate for the next three months, an almost incredible

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