Republicans are Crazy and Nobody Cares, Part 754

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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.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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