As Johny Rotten would say: "There is no reason why"

Try to make sense of Paul Ryan's colloquy with Ezra Klein regarding why, although he considers a disastrous U.S. debt crisis inevitable unless there's a radical change in our fiscal course, there should not even be a penny of tax rate increases as part of a fiscal deal to forestall the disaster.  In other words, not just increasing marginal rates, but even reducing tax expenditures (such as allowing them to be claimed at only a 28 percent rate) would apparently be far worse than a cataclysmic global fiscal meltdown.

Ryan should probably be credited with being smart enough to know what silly and evasive nonsense he is spouting.  He and his allies have chosen a fixed public political position, and he's not going to back off it just because an enterprising and knowledgeable reporter decides to give him a hard time.  But it is fun to see how hard a time he has in defending it credibly (even though he's been around long enough to know the available scripts).