Karl Smith doesn’t care if Mitt Romney is a liar, a cad, or a prick. He just wants to know what concrete things would be different under a Romney presidency compared to an Obama Presidency. My list is so conventional that I’m afraid it’s pretty boring, but here goes. All of this is based on the assumption that if the electorate is pro-Republican enough to elect Romney, it will also be pro-Republican enough to give Republicans control of the Senate.
- Obamacare gets repealed via reconciliation. And even if that turns out not to be possible, it will be gutted enough to make it all but dead in practice.
- The judicial system gets packed with a lot more conservative, business-friendly judges.
- The Bush tax cuts are made permanent.
- Corporate tax rates are cut substantially. There’s a slim chance that this would be done via a 1986-style tax reform bill that’s a net positive, but since Republicans wouldn’t need any Democratic help to pass it, probably not.
- The estate tax might very well be eliminated.
- Overall, for reasons of basic arithmetic, spending cuts will be much smaller than Romney and the GOP are promising, and the deficit will be substantially higher than it would be under Obama.
- We might stay in Afghanistan significantly longer than we would otherwise — though I’m not sure about this.
- Tightening of environmental regs would come to a halt. (Though it’s unclear how much of the existing regulatory infrastructure would get rolled back. Probably not that much.)
- If another financial crisis hits, Romney would be very constrained in how he could deal with it. (So would Obama, but probably somewhat less so.)
- Although congressional Republicans will be less successful than they’d like at slashing social welfare programs, they’ll still make some cuts. Life will get tougher for the poor.
- The NLRB would become toothless once again.
For the record, there are also several things I think won’t happen. Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann argue in the Washington Monthly that Republicans would eliminate the filibuster, but I doubt it. (And I’d count it as a long-term benefit in any case.) Romney has talked tough on China, but that’s just campaign bushwa. He’d quickly find out that his options are extremely limited on this score. On foreign policy more generally, Obama is actually fairly tenacious, despite Romney’s bluster to the contrary, and I doubt that Romney would be able to move much further to his right. Dodd-Frank is a question mark. I suspect some would get repealed (or effectively repealed) but not all of it. This couldn’t be done by reconciliation, after all. Social Security privatization is a nonstarter no matter who’s president. Substantial cuts to Medicare are probably unlikely too. Ditto for comprehensive immigration reform. And Romney’s appointments to the Fed probably wouldn’t be a lot different that Obama’s.
Among big ticket items, what have I missed?
