$343 billion.

That’s the increase between the deficit for fiscal year 2015 and fiscal year 2018— that is, the difference between the fiscal year before Ryan became speaker of the House and the fiscal year in which he retired.

..His budgets, for all the hard choices, didn’t actually add up. They included massive tax cuts with underestimated costs and unspecified financing.

…Ryan was elected speaker of the House on October 29, 2015. Over the next three years, annual deficits increased by almost 80 percent. The added debt is Ryan’s legacy, not his circumstance. It is entirely attributable to policy choices he made.

…Ryan proved himself and his party to be exactly what the critics said: monomaniacally focused on taking health insurance from the poor, cutting taxes for the rich, and spending more on the Pentagon. And he proved that Republicans were willing to betray their promises and, in their embrace of Trump, violate basic decency to achieve those goals.

…Ryan’s campaign for his failed Obamacare repeal bill was thick with similarly brazen deceptions, like that the legislation would strengthen protections for preexisting conditions, when in fact it would gut them.

…In important ways, Trump is not a break from the Republican Party’s recent past but an acceleration of it. A party that acculturates itself, its base, and its media sphere to constant nonsense can hardly complain when other political entrepreneurs notice that nonsense sells and decide to begin marketing their own brand of flimflam.

Speaker Paul Ryan retires: his legacy is debt and disappointment – Vox

hmmm