The new budget deal heading for President Obama's desk has a lot that's awful in it, including extensions of lots of taxes and subsidies that are supposedly temporary but are never allowed to lapse. There's no defending any of this as policy, and many will say this proves Paul Ryan is just another RINO squish like John Boehner.
I'm a glass-half-full guy. All that would have been the default stance of any other Congress, and certainly of Obama. Ryan, to his credit, at least exacted a price for keeping these things alive the next couple of years. And a very big price it was - and highly beneficial to the U.S. economy. After more than 40 years of holding back economic growth and vitality in the oil industry, the ban on oil exports appears headed for the ashbin of history: