GOP Pledge Architect McCarthy Can’t Name A Single Program He’d Cut From The Federal Budget
Yesterday, House Republicans rolled out their “Pledge to America,” which is supposedly a series of ideas that the GOP would enact tomorrow, if given the chance. At the top of the list, of course, is a full extension of the Bush tax cuts — at a cost of almost $4 trillion — and a promise to allow no tax increases.Republicans really should rename their party The Potemkin Village Idiots.
At the same time, though, the Pledge claims to put the country “on a path to a balanced budget.” But when it comes to spending cuts, it is incredibly vague, including only a promise to reduce non-defense discretionary spending to the 2008 level and to “set benchmarks” for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Today, in fact, the lead architect of the Pledge, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), couldn’t name a single program that he’d cut from the federal budget when pressed by MSNBC’s Savannah Guthrie and Chuck Todd:
GUTHRIE: Everybody likes to cut spending, but the issue is where, how? What specifically are you going to cut? [...]
MCCARTHY: What are you going to cut? Discretionary spending. Anything that’s not security…
TODD: Well, hang on. What is discretionary? Give us two or three items that are discretionary.
MCCARTHY: You could go through every different program within government, outside of entitlements, outside of national defense, that is discretionary spending that Congress has control of. That has gone over 88 percent in the last two years.
GUTHRIE; So what comes to mind for that, if you could wave a magic wand and do it unilaterally, what would you cut?
TODD: If you had the line item.
MCCARTHY: The line item would be across-the-board.
McCarthy finally settled on cutting Congress’ administrative spending, which he said would save $100 million. So in a $3 trillion federal budget, with a $1.3 trillion deficit, McCarthy identified $100 million in savings, reducing the deficit by less than 0.01 percent. And those savings won’t even come out of a federal program. But McCarthy is not unique in this regard: plenty of Republicans, including House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA), can’t identify a single program that they would cut.
With the Pledge, McCarthy and the rest of the House Republicans would have you believe that eliminating the deficit with cuts to discretionary spending is both possible and simple. But discretionary spending this year will be about $1.4 trillion. So you’d have to get rid of almost all of it — including discretionary defense spending — to eliminate the deficit.
The non-defense discretionary side of the budget — which includes all federal education funding, FEMA, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the National Park System, federal highway funding, food safety inspection, and the Secret Service — comes to about $530 billion, nowhere near enough to eliminate the deficit.
And if the Pledge were actually enacted, Republicans would be starting from an even deeper fiscal hole, as deficits over the next ten years would be $1.5 trillion higher under the Pledge than they would be under President Obama’s budget. That’s right, the House GOP pledge, taking Republicans entirely at their word that they’ll cut every dollar of spending they say they will, produces $1.5 trillion more in deficits than we would have under Obama’s budget.
Of course, since McCarthy can’t even be bothered to understand the economic policies laid out in his own book, it’s not surprising that he’s unable to justify the Pledge’s fuzzy math.
