“Thank goodness somebody is finally getting tough on Big Bird. It’s about time. We didn’t know that Big Bird was driving the federal deficit …. Elmo too?”
~President Obama
Romney will not spell out the huge cuts that he will make that are going to affect millions of Americans. One of the only real points of substance is that he would cut funding for PBS. I thought this moment with President Obama was classic and it kicked off a series of PBS tweets and memes. But Romney isn’t going to tell you all of the important programs that he has to cut in order to make his budget work.
Ezra Klein says it best here “Romney’s budget would require a 40% cut to everything but Medicare, Social Security, and defense.”
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. That means Medicaid, infrastructure, education, food safety, road safety, the postal service, basic research, foreign aid, housing subsidies, food stamps, the Census, Pell grants, the Patent and Trademark Office, the FDA — all of it has to be cut by, on average, 40 percent. If Romney tried to protect any particular priority, it would mean all the others have to be cut by more than 40 percent.
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.
