Romney’s Budget Promises on Medicare Cannot Be True
The political jiu-jitsu on Medicare since the selection of Paul Ryan as the GOP Vice Presidential candidate has been amazing to watch. Democrats shriek Romney/Ryan will “end Medicare as we know it.” Romney/Ryan countered by charging that health reform was funded by $716 Billion in Medicare cuts — it’s Obama who is the threat to the program. At the moment they’re fighting to a draw in the polls on the issue. But the fact is that Romney’s budget would restore the ACA cuts to Medicare — and require everything else the Federal government does except Social Security and defense to be cut by a catastrophic 40% as a result. Which means Romney’s budget proposal isn’t worth the paper it’s on.
As he prepared to keynote the Republican Convention Romney issued a statement: “A Romney-Ryan Administration will restore the funding to Medicare, ensure that no changes are made to the program for those 55 or older, and implement the reforms that they have proposed to strengthen it for future generations.” Avik Roy, a health-care policy adviser to Romney, doubled down. “Whatever you think of Obamacare’s cuts to Medicare, the fact is that a Romney administration would repeal them,” he writes.
Restoring the ACA’s Medicare cuts — which Ryan’s own budget proposals don’t dare do — means that if Romney is elected, by his third year in office, every federal program that is not Medicare, Social Security, or defense, will be cut, on average, by 40 percent. That means everything — roads and bridges, farm aid, foreign aid, food stamps, the works. EVERYTHING. It means cuts far deeper than even what his running-mate has proposed. Mushroom cloud on the American economy.
One of my all-time favorite bloggers, Ezra Klen at the Washington Post, summed it up best:
“Consider what Romney has promised. By 2016, he says federal spending will be below 20 percent of GDP, and at least 4 percent of that will be defense spending. At that point, he will cap federal spending at 20 percent of GDP, meaning it can never rise above that level.
“All that’s hard enough. Romney will have to cut federal spending by between $6 and $7 trillion over the next decade to hit those targets. As my colleague Suzy Khimm has detailed, those budget promises already require cuts far in excess of what even Paul Ryan’s budget proposes.
“But Ryan’s budget includes more than $700 billion in Medicare cuts over the next decade, Romney’s budget won’t. And Romney promises that there will be no other changes to Social Security or Medicare for those over 55, which means neither program can be cut for the next 10 years. But once you add up Medicare, Social Security and defense and you’ve got more than half of the federal budget. So Romney is going to make the largest spending cuts in history while protecting or increasing spending on more than half of the budget.
“The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities indulged this idea back in May. If Social Security and Medicare are spared from cuts, then to get federal spending under 20 percent of GDP while holding defense spending at 4 percent of GDP, “all other programs — including Medicaid, veterans’ benefits, education, environmental protection, transportation, and SSI — would have to be cut by an average of 40 percent in 2016 and 57 percent in 2022.”
“That’s not even remotely plausible. The consequences would be catastrophic. The outcry would be deafening. And Romney has shown no stomach for selling such severe cuts.
“Consider that, even as we speak, Romney is running away from the unpopular bits of the Ryan budget, which delivers far less devastating cuts than what Romney is promising. Does anyone really believe that he will take office and cut education by 40 percent? That he will take office and, after running away from specifics during the campaign, propose what would surely be the most unpopular budget in American history?
“And does anyone believe that the real Romney is the guy who made these outlandish budget promises in order to win a Republican primary, rather than the guy who is disavowing Ryan’s Medicare cuts mere days after naming him to the ticket?
“This is simply not a credible budget plan, and Romney’s fast retreat from Ryan’s most unpopular cuts makes it even less credible. And yet Romney, who has never released the specific cuts that would make his numbers add up, repeatedly touts it on the campaign trail, and the media dutifully reports his promises to cut federal spending by more than $500 billion in 2016, and in fact to balance the budget by the end of his second term, which would require far larger cuts than what I’ve outlined here, despite the fact that everyone basically knows these cuts aren’t credible and will never happen.
“I’m not sure what alternative there is, exactly, except to say, as clearly as possible, Romney’s budget plan is a fantasy, and it will never happen. I would revise that opinion if Romney released a list of specific cuts that achieved his spending goals and showed himself willing and able to take the heat for them. But I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
Woo. And Amen. It certainly seems as if the Emperor-Aspirant wears no clothes on the centerpiece of his campaign.