Romney on Cutting Spending

Here, in Mitt Romney's own words, is his plan to reduce government spending.  It involves what sounds like very reasonable reforms to rein in spending, and as long as you believe that government waste is the problem and don't mind cutting support for the arts, commuters, seniors, and poor people around the country, seems to solve some of the deficit issue.  The problems I see with the approach:

1. it assumes 4% growth for each of the next four years to achieve a goal of $500 billion in savings by 2016.  It doesn't really begin to solve the deficit, which is really caused by spending on Medicare and Social Security.

2.  Mr. Romney's reforms to Medicare and Social Security sound very reasonable, but they probably won't be enough.  We do need to attack entitlement reform along the lines of what Mr. Romney is proposing, but it will be hard to do.  Mr. Romney will have to work with Democrats to get some of this passed, and his reforms will have to be balanced and offset with some Democratic priorities in order to achieve any savings.  Privatizing Medicare is a non-starter for Democrats.

3.  It would be interesting to see if Pres. Obama proposed the same thing, what Republicans would say.  They would probably see it as a "fundamental reshaping of society" and "government meddling" somehow.  In fact, Mr. Obama has proposed eliminating waste in much the same way as Mr. Romney.  Mr. Romney goes out of his way to attack funding for Democratic priorities: Title X funding for Planned Parenthood, the NEA, the CPB, Amtrak, etc. etc.  So I don't see this getting through Congress unchanged.  We'll see what happens when Mr. Romney gets elected and actually has to govern this unruly country.

All in all, the plan sounds reasonable, but there are some holes in the plan, and it does reduce government support for a social net that is already fraying.