Now that Paul Ryan is coming under the sort of scrutiny which a member of the House of Representatives never gets – even a rising star saying all the right things – his reputation as a serious man with serious thoughts is falling apart.

Take the re-examination of his proposal, in 2008, to redefine the mandate of the Federal Reserve. Not problematic in itself; lots of people want to redefine the mandates of central banks. The most popular demand is insisting they switch from targeting low inflation to targeting nominal growth.

But Ryan wanted to change the Fed's mandate from its current dual requirement, to aim for low inflation and full employment, to one which only requires low inflation. He already clearly disapproves of fiscal stimulus, but it appears that he disapproves of monetary stimulus as well.

And in 2010, his explanation to Ezra Klein of how he would use monetary policy to help the economy was bizarre and plain wrong:

There’s a lot of capital parked out there, and we need to coax it out into the markets. I think literally that if we raised the federal funds rate by a point, it would help push money into the economy, as right now, the safest play is to stay with the federal money and federal paper.

As Mark Thoma puts it:

Basically, they are telling us that if a recession hits and they have their way, nothing will be done. Not a thing. No fiscal policy response (except perhaps austerity to make it worse), and no monetary response (except, if Ryan has his way, interest rate increases based upon a misunderstanding of how the economy works that would also make things worse).

Brad Plumer explains how the real heart of Ryan's monetary policy "isn’t quite a return to the long-abandoned gold standard, but it’s a roughly similar concept": anchoring the value of the dollar to a basket of commodities.

This is wingnut thinking, which Plumer argues can all be traced back to Ryan's love of Ayn Rand's terrible novel Atlas Shrugged:

In the passages that Ryan has highlighted, Rand’s characters lament that statists have destroyed all “objective standards” for currency by abandoning the gold standard and boosting the supply of paper money in order to assist the “looters and moochers.”

None of this is new; the writing was on the wall four years ago. But whereas proposing complicated-sounding economic measures is enough to get you a reputation of sorts in the House of Representative, it oughtn't be enough to maintain that reputation once you hit the big leagues. But Paul Krugman argues that the real reason for the Ryan pick is his uncanny ability to do just that:

Whence comes the Ryan reputation? As I said in my last post, it’s because many commentators want to tell a story about US politics that makes them feel and look good — a story in which both parties are equally at fault in our national stalemate, and in which said commentators stand above the fray. This story requires that there be good, honest, technically savvy conservative politicians, so that you can point to these politicians and say how much you admire them, even if you disagree with some of their ideas; after all, unless you lavish praise on some conservatives, you don’t come across as nobly even-handed.

And yet, implausibly, the Romney/Ryan ticket could, in the very short-term, be the best economic choice America has. Joe Weisenthal makes the case:

The biggest threat to the U.S. economy is the fiscal cliff. As Morgan Stanley's Adam Parker explained in a note today, there's a very plausible scenario where 5 percent of GDP is lopped off, and corporate profits get absolutely shredded. And this assumes that the debt ceiling is passed without creating a gigantic shock to the economy.

The best scenario for avoiding a fiscal cliff mess is to see Mitt Romney elected. As we argued back in early April, the surest way to get Republicans on board with ongoing deficits is for them to be the party in power again.

History seems to be pretty clear on one issue: Parties out of power favor austerity. Parties in power favor stimulus.

Weisenthal goes on to quote Josh Barro trying to guess Ryan's role in Romney's economic plan:

Conservatives are never fully going to trust Romney. If he comes to them with, say, economist Glenn Hubbard’s proposal to throw about a hundred billion taxpayer dollars at restructuring underwater home mortgages, they’re likely to resist.

But what if Vice President Paul Ryan makes the pitch? Won’t House Republicans be much more likely to conclude that mortgage bailouts actually are conservative?

I’m not suggesting that Ryan is going to throw conservatism entirely under the bus. Romney surely wants to do some things that Republicans in Congress will love and others they will be resistant to—only part of his economic plan is secret. So both sides of Ryan’s skill set will come into play.

In the end, even when a scenario is presented in which Ryan is actually good for the economy, it all comes back to his surface appeal. The man looks competent; he looks like a conservative, like someone who can be trusted, who has thought through his opinions, and hasn't based economic policy on a 55-year-old sci-fi novel.

He isn't, of course. But when's that ever stopped anyone?