Mitt Romney's voodoo spending cuts (how's 40% cuts to domestic programs sound?) [View all]

[Bill USA]

(emphases my own)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/10/30/mitt-romneys-voodoo-spending-cuts/

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Mitt Romney, interestingly, is an exception to this rule: He’s not offering huge tax cuts. Or, to be more precise, he is offering huge tax cuts but he’s promising to pay for them by closing tax breaks and ending deductions. That is to say, he’s at least admitting that tax cuts cost money and need to be paid for. Given that his various numbers don’t add up, there’s a bit of pixie dust there, but it is, rhetorically at least, a turn away from voodoo and towards responsibility.

More worrying is what we might call Romney’s voodoo spending cuts: His promise that his promised spending cuts, despite being deeper than any in modern history, won’t hurt anyone, anywhere, at any time, for any reason. In fact – shades of supply-side economics here — they’ll probably make government services even better.

[font size="+1"]Let’s start with the promises. Romney says he’ll cut federal spending to less than 20 percent of GDP by 2016, and he’ll do it without making cuts to Social Security or Medicare and while increasing spending on defense. To make that work, Romney will have to cut every other program in the federal budget – education, infrastructure, food safety, R&D, tax collections, FEMA, Medicaid, food stamps, national parks, etc – by 40 percent.[/font]

Those are massive, devastating cuts. But when you ask Romney to get specific, he talks about PBS and arts funding, as he did during the debates. And when Romney is left to his own devices, he doesn’t admit the reality of cutting federal spending at all. He hides all of it in vague plans to hand control over to the states.

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those 40% cuts wouldalso be applied to the State Department - including funding for security for state department officials stationed around the World.