Ezra Klein: Why Romney’s Budget Numbers Don’t Add Up
The federal budget is fairly simple. I can explain it to you in fewer than 30 words: Most of the money comes in through taxes and borrowing. The vast majority of it is then spent on programs for the old, the poor and defense. That’s pretty much it.
Mitt Romney’s plans for the federal budget are also fairly simple. I can explain them to you in less than 100 words: He’s promising that taxes will go down, defense spending will go up and old-people programs won’t change “for those at or near retirement.” So three of his four options for deficit reduction — taxes, old-people programs and defense — are either contributing to the deficit or are off-limits for the next decade.
Romney is also promising that he will balance the budget and reduce total federal spending by more than $6 trillion over the next 10 years. But the only big pot of money left to him is poor-people programs. So by simple process of elimination, poor-people programs will have to be cut dramatically under a Romney presidency. About 40 percent of projected spending, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Actually, that was 126 words.
What’s not simple is imagining how that would work in practice. The Occam’s-razor explanation, of course, is that it wouldn’t. Peter Suderman, an associate editor at the libertarian magazine Reason, writes that “Romney has no real plan or interest in actually making the numbers work.”