The Ryan budget 'plan' is full of best case assumptions that are unrealistic one by one and laughable in combination. Any budget busting legislation you'd want to pass would balance the budget in the long-run, while unbalancing it in the politically relevant medium run, if you can make these sorts of best-case assumptions.
My favorite assumption is, from the CBO scoring document:
The path for all other federal spending excluding interest—that is, for discretionary spending and mandatory spending apart from that for Social Security and the major mandatory health care programs—was specified by Chairman Ryan’s staff. The remaining part of mandatory spending includes such programs as federal civilian and military retirement, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, unemployment compensation, Supplemental Security Income, the refundable portion of the earned income and child tax credits, and most veterans’ programs. Discretionary spending includes both defense spending and nondefense spending—in roughly equal amounts currently. That combination of other mandatory and discretionary spending was specified to decline from 12 percent of GDP in 2010 to about 6 percent in 2021 and then move in line with the GDP price deflator beginning in 2022, which would generate a further decline relative to GDP. No proposals were specified that would generate that path.
So we cut the share of all defense and non-defense federal non-healh care and non-social security spending in GDP in half in ten years and by 70% in 40 years. Even if you try to spare defense spending, you're not going to get more than 2% of GDP for defense if you cap all spending in this category at 3.5% of GDP. We're back to the pre-WWII level of national security spending not seen since 1939: no large miliary and intelligence establishment able to fight war abroad. We're not just talking no wars abroad, we're talking of a denfense establishment without the capability to fight wars abroad, at least with any chance of winning. It's international comminity police actions in nice multilateral coalitions at best, if they are cheap.
Somebody should tell.
I do expect large defense cuts are going to be part of the budget process in the next ten years and getting to West European defense spending levels isn't crazy if the world turns out nicely. But it is funny (or infuriating) to see even larger defense cuts than I consider realistic in a non-best case scenario in the Republican plan without it receiving any attention.
Did I mention that the Ryan proposal has tax cuts to give back to currently high income taxpayers the benefits of these unspecified future spending cuts next year?
What sort of country is this? This is like telling the staff that you are going to fund their retirement from your future lottery winnings while you loot their bank accounts.
The only thing that keeps me sane is the thought that this is part of the political dance and the propaganda war. Still, even that is not the most comforting thought.
Comments