Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
It looks like the "Galt - Gekko 2012" campaign is having a really bad day with budget analysis. First, Reagan's OMB Director David Stockman savaged the Paul Ryan budget in a New York Times op-ed column, and now Ezra Klein savages Willard "Mittens" Romney's budget in the Washington Post. Romney’s budget plan is a fantasy:
Consider what Romney has promised. By 2016, he says federal spending will be below 20 percent of GDP, and at least 4 percent of that will be defense spending. At that point, he will cap federal spending at 20 percent of GDP, meaning it can never rise above that level.
All that’s hard enough. Romney will have to cut federal spending by between $6 and $7 trillion over the next decade to hit those targets. As my colleague Suzy Khimm has detailed, those budget promises already require cuts far in excess of what even Paul Ryan’s budget proposes.
But Ryan’s budget includes more than $700 billion in Medicare cuts over the next decade, Romney’s budget won’t. And Romney promises that there will be no other changes to Social Security or Medicare for those over 55, which means neither program can be cut for the next 10 years. But once you add up Medicare, Social Security and defense and you’ve got more than half of the federal budget. So Romney is going to make the largest spending cuts in history while protecting or increasing spending on more than half of the budget.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities indulged this idea back in May. If Social Security and Medicare are spared from cuts, then to get federal spending under 20 percent of GDP while holding defense spending at 4 percent of GDP, “all other programs — including Medicaid, veterans’ benefits, education, environmental protection, transportation, and SSI — would have to be cut by an average of 40 percent in 2016 and 57 percent in 2022.”
Consider what the Romney campaign, then, is saying: If Romney is elected, then by his third year in office, every single federal program that is not Medicare, Social Security, or defense, will be cut, on average, by 40 percent. That means Medicaid, infrastructure, education, food safety, road safety, the postal service, basic research, foreign aid, housing subsidies, food stamps, the Census, Pell grants, the Patent and Trademark Office, the FDA — all of it has to be cut by, on average, 40 percent. If Romney tried to protect any particular priority, it would mean all the others have to be cut by more than 40 percent.
That’s not even remotely plausible. The consequences would be catastrophic. The outcry would be deafening. And Romney has shown no stomach for selling such severe cuts.
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This is simply not a credible budget plan, and Romney’s fast retreat from Ryan’s most unpopular cuts makes it even less credible. And yet Romney, who has never released the specific cuts that would make his numbers add up, repeatedly touts it on the campaign trail, and the media dutifully reports his promises to cut federal spending by more than $500 billion in 2016, and in fact to balance the budget by the end of his second term, which would require far larger cuts than what I’ve outlined here, despite the fact that everyone basically knows these cuts aren’t credible and will never happen.
I’m not sure what alternative there is, exactly, except to say, as clearly as possible, Romney’s budget plan is a fantasy, and it will never happen.
It is a fraud.
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