"Romney’s Severely Conservative Budget Promises"

Ezra Klein digs into Romney's budget proposal:

Romney’s severely conservative budget promises, by Ezra Klein: In his speech to CPAC, Mitt Romney repeated a promise that he’s delivered repeatedly on the campaign trail. “Without raising taxes or sacrificing America’s critical defense superiority, I will finally balance the budget.” That sounds pretty good. It sounds really good, in fact. And then you look at the numbers...

Romney ... has offered enough detail that we can estimate the cuts required to meet his targets. In that spirit, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities tried to run the numbers on Romney’s proposals. The results were so outlandish that they actually ran them two ways to make Romney look better.

In the first scenario, Romney follows through on his promise to balance the budget and cuts spending to 17 percent of GDP [as promised]. If you assume Romney is balancing the budget by 2021 — the end of his second term — that requires cutting expected spending on every domestic program, including Social Security and Medicare, by 36.4 percent. If Social Security is spared, as Romney has suggested it will be for the next 10 years, that rises to 53.4 percent.

In the second scenario, Romney ignores his promise to balance the budget and simply tries to cap spending at 20 percent of GDP [as promised]. Then, the required cuts to domestic programs are only 23.5 percent. And, if Social Security is spared, 34.5 percent. This is the scenario Romney tends to reference in his speeches...

Put aside whether you consider cuts of this magnitude desirable. Romney has not put forward any specific plans under which they would be achievable. And that’s for good reason:... If you assume the cuts are distributed equally across all domestic spending programs, Romney’s numbers imply cutting more than $500 billion from food stamps and related programs for the poorest Americans, cutting $2.3 trillion from Social Security, cutting $174 billion from veteran’s benefits and so forth.

These cuts are so deep in part because they are paying for trillions of dollars in relatively regressive tax cuts. So he’s not simply proposing to cut spending. He’s proposing to transfer resources from those who rely on government programs — namely, the poor and seniors — to those who will benefit from his tax cuts. ...

In his speech to CPAC, Romney criticized “those who say you can’t talk straight to the American people on these key issues and still win an election.” ... So far, Romney has been straight about how much he would like the government to spend. But is he ready to be straight about what he will cut?