Ryan: 'Excited' for a campaign about budget

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CNN's Gregory Wallace

(CNN) - Rep. Paul Ryan answered questions about his past budget proposals in a Tuesday interview by saying he has "joined the Romney ticket" and is "excited" for a campaign in which the budget proposals of each campaign take a central role.

His proposals have overshadowed Mitt Romney's own less-detailed proposal in the days since Republican presidential candidate Romney introduced Ryan on Saturday as his running mate.

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"Yes I'm excited about that," he said in the interview, which aired Tuesday on Fox News. "I'm eager to join this debate, because we owe the country a clear choice and different solutions."

Ryan, a seven-term congressman from Wisconsin and chair of the House Budget Committee, said he was unsure when Romney's proposals would balance the federal budget. Romney's plans say he would "put the federal government on a course toward a balanced budget," but does not say when.

"Well I don't know exactly when it balances because we haven't - I won't get wonky on you, but we haven't run the numbers on that specific plan," Ryan said. "The plans that we've offered in the House balance the budget."

A March evaluation of Ryan's plan by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says Ryan's plan would bring the federal budget "nearly in balance in 2050" under the CBO's primary model. Under a scenario proposed by Ryan's staff, the deficit "would be around 1 percent of gross domestic product in the 2020s and would decline further after 2030" - ultimately showing a surplus by 2040.

Romney's economic plan proposes capping federal spending at 20% of GDP in 2016, while calculations based on the CBO scoring of Ryan's budget show spending on all federal programs - including entitlements, mandatory, and discretionary spending - would comprise approximately 17.25% of GDP in 2030. The report did not include calculations for 2016.

Romney's plan, released in September 2011, does not say when he would bring the federal budget into balance, and in March the candidate said his plans "can't be scored" because key details are omitted, such as how he would change deductions and exemption in the tax code.

Asked in his Tuesday interview what loopholes and deductions the Romney-Ryan administration would eliminate, Ryan deferred.

"That is something we think we should do in the light of day through Congress," he said, charging the process would be "unlike how Obamacare was passed."

And pressed when additional details of Romney's plan would be released, Ryan claimed, "You have seen more details from Mitt Romney on fiscal policy, on saving entitlements, on getting back to work than the president of the United States is offering." The interviewer presented him with the fact that Obama has released detailed federal budgets while in office, to which Ryan replied that the president "didn't even try to balance the budget."

"The Romney-Ryan plan for a stronger middle class is about offering solutions to get us back on track, create jobs, balance the budget, get people back to work," he said.

Ryan's Medicare proposal has been hit hard by Democrats as a plan to gut the program, though Ryan has said it is necessary to keep the program solvent. He said that Medicare is "absolutely" a winning issue for Republicans, "because we're the ones who are offering a plan to save Medicare, to protect Medicare, to strengthen Medicare."

Turning to the formation of the Romney-Ryan ticket, the congressman said the bonding began in earnest when the two campaigned together earlier this cycle.

"We spent about five days in a row, five 14-or-so-hour days," together, he said, "and in between all of those stops, driving from Appleton to Green Bay to Janesville to Milwaukee we got to know each other. We conversed on policy issues, on where to take the country.

"And sooner or later we began sharing the microphones at these town hall meetings, and we just kinda developed a chemistry with one another and a mutual understanding of each other," he said.