Romney's budget proposal would shut down the government

Mitt Romney is making a lot of wild promises on the campaign trail about how he’s going to eliminate the deficit and balance the federal budget. He speaks in broad generalities mostly, but the Center for Budget and and Policy Priorities analyzed his proposals using what few specifics Romney has offered and issued a report on the real world effects of Romney’s budget:

The cuts that would be required under the Romney budget proposals in programs such as veterans’ disability compensation, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) for poor elderly and disabled individuals, SNAP (formerly food stamps), and child nutrition programs would move millions of households below the poverty line or drive them deeper into poverty. The cuts in Medicare and Medicaid would make health insurance unaffordable (or unavailable) to tens of millions of people. The cuts in non-defense discretionary programs — a spending category that covers a wide variety of public services such as elementary and secondary education, law enforcement, veterans’ health care, environmental protection, and biomedical research — would come on top of the deep cuts in this part of the budget that are already in law due to the discretionary funding caps established in last year’s Budget Control Act (BCA).

We’re not talking about small amounts here. If Romney enacted his proposals “non-defense programs other than Social Security would have to be cut 29 percent in 2016 and 59 percent in 2022. Without the balanced budget requirement, the cuts would be smaller but still massive, reaching 40 percent in 2022.”

And don’t forget that Romney also strongly supports Paul Ryan’s plan to voucherize Medicare and force senior citizens to go out and find private health insurance on their own. With cuts as large as Romney’s proposal would require, I don’t think those vouchers are going to buy much coverage. But that’s the Republican plan for our future. Doesn’t look that bright to me.