Dean Baker takes on Paul Ryan and a lot of the fawning love Ryan has received from the political press that ignores that the truth is Ryan is no deficit hawk.

Governor Romney’s decision to select Paul Ryan as his running mate has condemned the country to 90 days of ridiculous news stories and columns about a choice on the size and role of government. The debate is silly because its explicit assumption is that Paul Ryan wants a small role for government. There is no evidence to support this assertion.

From here, Baker outlines a number of ways he’s previously identified in his book, “The End of Loser Liberalism” around how the government structures economies that amount to billions or even trillions of subsidies and protections for certain industries. This obviously has to do with the size of government and its role in the economy, yet is ignored by both the press and conservatives in favor of limiting the discussion to taxes and spending.

Baker goes on:

While Paul Ryan is a vocal opponent of the policies that the government has in place to protect low and middle income people, he has never indicated any opposition to the massive interventions, like patent monopolies for prescription drugs and the Fed’s policy of using unemployment to fight inflation, that redistribute income upward. For this reason, it is flatly wrong to describe Mr. Ryan as a supporter of small government. He is more accurately described as an opponent of government interventions that redistribute income downward and a supporter of government policies that redistribute income upward. [Emphasis added]

I don’t expect many reporters will take up Baker’s accurate framing of Paul Ryan, but it’d be nice if they did.