JONATHAN COHN APRIL 28, 2011
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Discussion of the House Republican budget has focused mostly on the privatization of Medicare, the block-granting of Medicaid, and the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. And that’s appropriate, given the magnitude of the changes and widespread impact they would have. But those proposals are obscuring some other proposed shifts that, in any other context, would be plenty troubling for their own sake. This week I'll highlight five of them. So far, I've written about radical changes to the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), changes in the eligibility age for Medicare, and a crucial weakening of financial reform. Today I look at how cuts in non-entitlement spending will affect infrastructure and other public goods.
The Republican budget’s proposed cuts to the federal government’s health care programs are dramatic. But you know what’s even more dramatic? The cuts to just about everything else.
The Republican budget’s goal is not merely to reduce the deficit. It’s also to reduce government spending. According to Congressional Budget Office estimates, the Republican budget would reduce the size of government to 20 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2015 and to less than 15 percent by 2020. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes, that would be the lowest level since 1951.
Here’s where you need to stop and think about the math. The government looked a little different back in the early 1950s. Medicare and Medicaid did not exist. Social Security was less generous. So if you want to shrink the government to what it was then and maintain those programs, even in significantly diminished form, there’s going to be less room in the budget for everything else. Sure enough, according to the CBO, the fraction of GDP that goes to spending outside of those three big entitlement programs would fall “from 12 percent [of GDP] in 2010 to 6 percent in 2022 and 3 1/2 percent by 2050 ... spending in this category has exceeded 8 percent of GDP in every year since World War II.”
Throw in the fact that the Republican budget would not call for massive reductions in defense spending, and you end up with the Center on Budget’s conclusion: Most of the rest of the government would “cease to exist.”
Another way to think about this is in programmatic terms--and what that would mean neglecting. It’d mean massive cuts to all sorts of means-tested programs upon which the poor, in particular, rely. But it’d also mean substantial cuts to investments in public goods, like education and infrastructure. According to Adam Hersh and Sarah Ayres of the Center for American Progress, the end result of the Republican budget would be a 53 percent reduction in per capita spending on education and training, a 28 percent reduction in scientifically oriented research and development, and a 37 percent reduction in transportation infrastructure.
Even if you buy the conservative argument that the reduced tax burden of the Republican budget will boost growth, it’s hard to ignore the neglect that would result. Numerous reports, for example, have warned about the country’s crumbling transportation infrastructure.
The graph below illustrates just how deep the Republican budget would cut transportation spending, based on Hersh and Ayres's analysis. I can't vouch for the arithmetic. But, given what I know about the Republican budget as a whole, their conclusions hardly seem far-fetched.
Update: Matthew Yglesias points to new Economist story comparing commute times across nations and linking the laggard U.S. performance to poor infrastructure here.
10 comments
Vandals out to sack Rome.
- roidubouloi
April 28, 2011 at 12:17am
Well, out in Colorado, somebody built a private highway, approximately from DIA to Parker. It parallels the people's highway and costs about $8.00 per trip. Frankly I think this is NOT a good idea.
- Sophia
April 28, 2011 at 12:58am
This part of the Republican budget proposal makes perfect sense if you accept the premise that the US government needs to revert to the spending levels of 5 or 6 decades ago, which was of course the time of origin of the belief that we would all have jetpacks by the year 2011. So once the free market is unleashed and facilitates mass jetpack sales here, as we were bloody promised, roads & infrastructure won't require much upkeep or investment. . . . Mr. Cohn and, I've noticed, Senator Bernie Sanders (a subscriber, perhaps?) are right about the other 3 scary things he's detailed so far in this Ryan plan gibberish, though. Can't wait to be outraged again tomorrow with #5!
- Konstantin
April 28, 2011 at 1:35am
I would remove the word "also" from the second sentence of the second paragraph after the introduction and "merely" from the first sentence of the same paragraph to match reality as I see it.
- Nusholtz
April 28, 2011 at 4:30am
Ben Laden predicted after the 9/11 attacks that we would soon be shadow of our former self. Did he have the gift of prophecy?
- paskunac
April 28, 2011 at 6:27am
Cohn's posts have a both clarity and depth that make them easy to read, informative, and persuasive. It's easy to understand why Cohn, of all the bloggers, has become the most often cited by PK in his blog.
- rayward
April 28, 2011 at 8:24am
So the Republican budget is still racing toward third-world status then.
- AllanL5
April 28, 2011 at 10:39am
"Most of the rest of the government would cease to exist.” Or to use conservatives' favorite expression about the ideal size of the government, "It would be small enough to drown in a bathtub." This is their cherished vision for the future of the United States. America: banana republic of North America. Powerful military, obscenely rich elite, and impoverished middle class.
- DAVIDDREIER@EARTHLINK.NET-old
April 28, 2011 at 11:47am
DaveyD, that's an accurate characterization. And I'd go a bit further, too: not only a militarized society with a dangerous class imbalance in wealth, opportunity, and privilege, but a country increasingly unable to understand or articulate the reasons for its own decline. I remember Christopher Hitchens saying something a few years ago, about Islamic societies being caught in a trap where the concepts and language needed to understand their problems (and potential escape) were rejected as theologically unacceptable, and that this left only resentment and anger as legitimate paths to take. In the extreme forms, e.g. Wahabi teaching, what cannot be squared with a pure Islam of 1300 years ago doesn't have any validity. Whether Hitch was right or wrong about that is another issue, but I've often thought about the way Republicans now don't just want to win elections and shift the advantage to the rich, but to neutralize and even extinguish from the American conversation the notions of analysis, evidence, comparison, and objective truth that in many ways infused the exercise of government in the 20th century. Not that everything was good, but it was a distinct improvement over the corruption and stupidity of the 19th century, themselves brought about by the failure of a basically 18th-century system to get to grips with industrialization and urbanization. The GOP now represents not a philosophy of individualism and free-market economics, but a theology of the same. My fear is that in 100-150 years' time, people elsewhere will be writing about the sudden decline of the United States, using concepts and language that Americans will no longer understand.
- ironyroad
April 28, 2011 at 1:59pm
When the government is of a size to be easily extinguished in a bathtub, exploitation can reign supreme. This is the ideal Republican world, yes?
- cspencef
April 28, 2011 at 4:10pm