National Review’s Robert Costa has a piece on the hesitancy of freshmen House Republicans to embrace House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) radical Roadmap for America’s Future, which purports to balance the budget by dramatically cutting both Social Security and Medicare. There’s no real surprise here: last session, when Republicans were in the minority with no hope of seeing their vision for the budget adopted, Republican House leadership pointedly refused to endorse Ryan’s plan.

However, Costa reported that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), while not on-board with wholesale adoption of the Roadmap, “does see an opportunity for aspects of the roadmap to become policy“:

“I am supportive of the direction that Paul is headed,” he says. Still, he cautions, “as you know, the budget is something that is [scored] within the budget window for the next ten years. I’m hopeful that we can get elements of what Paul is aiming for incorporated.”

Since the GOP seems to be scared stiff of (at least publicly) supporting the portions of the Roadmap dealing with entitlements, what elements might Cantor be talking about? Well, for one thing, since the GOP is endowing Ryan with the unprecedented power to unilaterally set spending limits that are binding on the House, the spending caps that Ryan proposes in the Roadmap (where he doesn’t spell out what these caps would mean in terms of cuts to actual programs) could make an appearance, even though Ryan himself can’t name actual spending programs that he wants to see cut.

But the real meat of Ryan’s proposal is its draconian cuts to both Social Security and Medicare, which would both be essentially privatized over a number of years. In fact, the phase-in of the Roadmap is so slow that federal debt actually increases for decades under the plan that Ryan put on paper, exceeding 100 percent of GDP before starting to come down. The Roadmap’s tax reforms also manage to lose trillions in revenue while raising taxes on 90 percent of Americans.

Back in September, Ryan and Cantor released the book “Young Guns,” which included a chapter detailing and praising the Roadmap. So is Cantor actually on-board with Ryan’s goal of fully dismantling Social Security and Medicare, but hiding from the political ramifications?

On Sunday, former Minnesota governor and potential 2012 presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty (R) — touting his own state’s 2005 government shutdown — said that Republicans in Congress should flat-out refuse to raise the nation’s debt ceiling when the country’s legal borrowing limit is reached in the coming months. “I’m glad we had that showdown in Minnesota. As to the federal government, they should not raise the debt ceiling,” Pawlenty said.

Pawlenty appeared on MSNBC today to expound on his views, as well as flesh out a proposal he has that would strictly sequence government spending in order to avoid the U.S. defaulting on its debt (which is what ultimately occurs if the debt ceiling is not raised). He told MSNBC’s Chuck Todd that failure to raise the debt ceiling is good for the U.S. economy, and said that the GOP should hold the debt ceiling hostage to cuts in entitlement spending:

TODD: Do you really think [refusing to increase the debt ceiling] is good for the American economy? Forget the politics of it a moment — it may be good politics — but is this good for the economy?

PAWLENTY: Well, I think it is, Chuck. [...] Say to the Congress, we’ll sequence the spending, pay those debt obligations with the interest as they’re due, make sure the military gets paid and taken care of, then let’s have the debate on entitlement reform that everybody always gets on your show and shows like this and say, ‘Savannah, Chuck, it’s time to make the tough decisions’ and they never do. The only way the politicians are going to make the tough decisions is to put their backs against the wall.

Watch it:

Conservative David Frum called Pawlenty’s sequencing proposal “more a piece of campaign positioning than a serious idea,” and noted serious problems with it, including that it would leave Medicare and Medicaid patients out in the cold and make the U.S. unable to replace military equipment in Afghanistan. And while Pawlenty is correct that the U.S. hitting its debt ceiling doesn’t immediately mean default, there is only so much Treasury can do before real problems would begin to occur in already shaky global financial markets.

Ultimately, as David Min wrote, failing to raise the debt ceiling in a timely manner may make paying off the debt — and therefore grappling with the country’s long-term structural deficit — far more expensive:

Taken together, these factors would almost certainly result in a significant increase in the interest rates we currently pay on our national debt, currently just above 2.5 percent for a 10-year Treasury note. If in the near term these rates moved even to 5.9 percent, the long-term rate predicted by the Congressional Budget Office, then our interest payments would increase by more than double, to nearly $600 billion a year. These rates could climb even higher, if investors began to price in a “default risk” into Treasurys — something that reckless actions by Congress could potentially spark — thus greatly exacerbating our budget problems.

That Pawlenty thinks this would be a good outcome — and is advocating Congress flirt with it unless President Obama accede to gutting entitlements — shows how irresponsible mainstream Republicans are when it comes to the nation’s finances.