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Earlier this morning I said that since Paul Ryan’s latest budget proposal caps revenues and cuts Medicare and Social Security only modestly, this means that “everything non-elderly gets whacked hard.”

But what does that mean? Well, it turns out that the Congressional Budget Office has put a concrete number to “whacked hard” here. Medicaid and CHIP (children’s healthcare) would decline from 2% of GDP today to 1% of GDP in 2050, and everything else — that is, everything other than Social Security and Medicare — would decline from 12.5% of GDP today to about 4% of GDP in 2050.

This is, to put it mildly, nuts. Defense spending alone amounts to 4% of GDP, and it’s vanishingly unlikely that this will ever fall much below 2-3% of GDP. This means that all domestic spending will decline from about 8% of GDP to 1-2% of GDP by 2050. That’s prisons, border control, education, the FBI, courts, embassies, the IRS, FEMA, housing, student loans, roads, unemployment insurance, etc. etc. It’s everything. Whacked by about 80% or so.

This is not a serious plan. I don’t care how serious Paul Ryan sounds, or how many numbers he spouts, or how many charts he buries us under. It’s not serious.

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And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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