Today on ABC’s This Week, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) acknowledged to host Christiane Amanpour that the latest round of congressional town hall meetings have revealed a building frustration among voters over the budget plan he engineered for the Republicans:

AMANPOUR: How are the crowds increasing in their levels of anxiety and frustration?

RYAN: It’s increasing, no two ways about it. [...]

RYAN: The crowds are really getting bigger, and people are getting much more anxious about, just, where the country’s headed.

Watch it:

The frustration is understandable and merited. As ThinkProgress has reported, Ryan’s budget would strip huge amounts of funding from Medicare by transforming it from a guaranteed health benefits system into one that merely provides a fixed level of money — which does not keep up with rising health care costs — that seniors can use to purchase private plans. It also guts Medicaid by block-granting the funds to the states and strips funding from food stamps and other programs to support the middle- and lower-income classes. And it does all this while keeping taxes on the wealthy extraordinarily low.

Indeed, the perverse priorities revealed by the Republicans’ proposed budget has driven a wave of rising Main Street anger across the country over the last week:

As Washington considers ways to rein in the deficit, Republicans have obstinately demanded that any tax revenue increases be taken off the table, claiming that raising taxes during a down economy would doom the recovery. As evidence, they often point to the presidency of Ronald Reagan, claiming his massive 1981 tax cuts caused that decade’s economic boom. But this anti-tax position makes it almost impossible to do anything serious about the deficit, since — despite GOP talking points — the country has a revenue problem, not a spending problem. On ABC’s This Week today, Reagan’s own budget director, David Stockman, exposed the GOP tax cut “theology” for the ahistorical sham it is. Asked by Reuter’s Chrystia Freeland if the economy could “sustain” a tax increase, Stockman said “absolutely,” noting that the economy only recovered under Reagan once he raised taxes in 1982 after “cut[ting] taxes too much” the year before:

FREELAND: You worked for Ronald Reagan. Do you think the American economy — so you’re, like, a red-blooded capitalist — could it sustain higher taxes than it has now?

STOCKMAN: Absolutely. In 1982, we were looking at the jaws of the worst recession since the 1930s. We overdid it in 1981, cut taxes too much. We came back with a big deficit reduction plan in 1982. Unemployment’s at 10 percent, the economy is in dire shape, and we raise taxes by 1.2 percent of GDP, which would be $150 billion a year right now — not 10 years down the road — but right now.

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Stockman also attacked Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) budget plan, noting it “does not cut one dime from the debt” in the next three years. Indeed, in addition to being draconian and regressive, Ryan’s budget fails to acomplish the only thing it sets out to do — solve the deficit — despite claims from Washington journalists that his plan is “serious.”

Following rowdy town hall meetings this week in which constituents confronted their representatives for voting for the GOP plan to effectively end Medicare, Republican leaders are insisting that they are not having second thoughts about the scheme.

But even Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) — perhaps Congress’ most outspoken conservative and most sincere promoter of the anti-government Tea Party movement — seems to be backing away from the plan. Appearing on Fox News Sunday today with host Chris Wallace, Bachmann refused to back everything in the GOP budget, saying there should be an “asterisk” next to her vote for the plan because she is concerned about how it would shift healthcare costs to seniors:

WALLACE: What do you tell people nearing retirement who say I can’t afford to pay more of my own healthcare costs out of pocket? Which is what the Ryan and Republican Study Committee plans would do.

BACHMANN: And I understand that. I put an asterisks on my support, I put a blog posting up that said just as much. That is my area of concern, I support this bill with that proviso. … One position that I’m concerned about shifting the cost burden to senior citizens. Seniors are saying, look, I’m not in a positon to be able to handle that. I also share that real fear, that’s why I put that asterisks out there. [...]

WALLACE: So you’re not wedded to the idea of a voucher program for Medicare?

BACHMANN: I’m wedded to the idea of efficiencies and cost cuttings and savings in healthcare, but how we get there is open to discussion.

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Indeed, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office found that “[u]nder the proposal, most elderly people would pay more for their health care than they would pay under the current Medicare system.”

On Thursday, in an op-ed on Red State, Bachmann wrote that while she supports most of the GOP budget, “I’ve expressed caution about how we approach the issue of Medicare.” Considering that Bachmann has previously said we must “wean everybody” off Medicare and Social Security, her new hesitancy to do so belies the extremely unpopular nature of the GOP plan.