Romney’s Budget Fairy Tale
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/05/romneys-budget-fairy-tale.html
Romneys Budget Fairy Tale
By Jonathan Chait
Mitt Romney delivered a speech today about the budget deficit.
Its hard to wrap your arms around Romneys argument, because its an amalgamation of free-floating conservative rage and anxiety, completely untethered to any facts, as agreed upon by the relevant experts.
In the real world, the following things are true: The budget deficit was projected to top $1 trillion even before President Obama took office, and that was when forecasters were still radically underestimating the depth of the 2008 crash. Obama did propose temporary deficit-increasing measures, an economic approach endorsed in its general contours, if not its particulars, by Romneys economists. These measures contributed a relatively small proportion to the deficit, and their effect is short-lived. Obama instead focused on longer-term measures to reduce the deficit, including comprehensive health-care reform projected to reduce deficits by a trillion dollars in its second decade. Obama put forward a budget plan that would stabilize the debt as a percentage of the economy. Obama has hoped to achieve deeper long-term deficit reduction by striking bipartisan deals with Congress, and he has tried to achieve this goal by openly endorsing a bipartisan deficit plan in the Senate and privately agreeing to a more conservative plan with John Boehner, both of which were killed by Republican opposition to any higher revenue.
The story told by Romney is one in which all of these things are either untrue or could not possibly be true.
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Not only does Romney elide vast swaths of established facts about the deficit, its fairly clear that he does not operate within the mainstream understanding of the term deficit at all. As Jonathan Bernstein has repeatedly explained, modern Republican behavior and even language in relation to the deficit is completely nonsensical if you understand the deficit to mean the gap between revenue and outlays. Republican use of the term only makes sense if you define the deficit to mean spending Republicans dont like. Thats why Republicans consider it impossible to believe that one could simultaneously extend health insurance to the uninsured while reducing the deficit.
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In Romneys telling, the terms debt and spending are essentially interchangeable. When presented with Obamas position that the solution to the debt ought to include both higher taxes and lower spending he rejects it out of hand. Naturally, Romney has admitted before that his budget plan cant be scored. Its an expression of conservative moral beliefs about the role of government. While loosely couched in budgetary terms, Romney is expressing an analysis that resides outside of, and completely at odds with, mainstream macroeconomic forecasting and scoring assumptions.