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.<\/p>\n
All that\u2019s 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\u00a0detailed, those budget promises already require cuts far in excess of what even Paul Ryan\u2019s budget proposes.<\/p>\n
But Ryan\u2019s budget includes more than $700 billion in Medicare cuts over the next decade, Romney\u2019s budget won\u2019t. And\u00a0Romney 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\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n
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, \u201call other programs \u2014 including Medicaid, veterans\u2019 benefits, education, environmental protection, transportation, and SSI \u2014 would have to be cut by an average of 40 percent in 2016 and 57 percent in 2022.\u201d<\/p>\n
Consider what the Romney campaign, then, is saying: If Romney is elected, then by his third year in office, every single federal program that is not Medicare, Social Security, or defense, will be cut, on average, by 40 percent.<\/p>\n