Jared Bernstein notes that if he’s elected president, Mitt Romney has promised to “immediately move to cut spending and cap it at 20 percent of GDP.” That’s crazy with the economy so sluggish, but in fact, it’s even crazier than that. Here are budget projections for 2013 from the OMB:
- Medicare: $534 billion
- Social Security: $807 billion
- Other mandatory: $858 billion
- Interest: $320 billion
- Defense: $675 billion
- Total: $3,194 billion
The first four items are mandatory and Romney can’t do anything about them, and I think he’s made it pretty clear that he doesn’t plan to cut defense spending. These five items collectively amount to 19.06% of projected GDP in 2013.
In other words, Romney is proposing that everything else in the budget be immediately cut to 0.94% of GDP. That’s all he has left to fund the FAA, the border patrol, the FBI, overseas embassies, highways, disaster relief, the SEC, the court system, NASA, prisons, national parks, school lunches, flood control, medical research, and everything else in the domestic discretionary budget. That’s an 87% cut in those programs.
This is the guy who used to run Bain Consulting? It doesn’t look to me like he can even read a balance sheet.
