The Experts Comment on Romney's Budget

Romney on October 3, 2012 said he would have a balanced budget - He also said to lower corporate tax rate, the tax cuts to oil probably will be on the table. President Obama brought up that Romney’s plan calls for a $5 trillion cut in the deficit; fact checkers found his plan calls for $4.8 trillion (apparently Romney doesn’t know about the rounding up rule). In a September "Meet the Press" interview, Romney said "People at the high end, high-income taxpayers, are going to have fewer deductions and exemptions". Voters should trust that he could achieve his goal without raising middle-class taxes because "5 different economic studies, including one at Harvard and Princeton" support his case. FactCheck.org said 2 of the “studies” were blog items, none of the 3 others were nonpartisan (Harvard study: Martin Feldstein, former head of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Reagan and 2 by Romney campaign advisers).

Everything I’ve read states Romney’s plan cannot cut the deficit without huge cuts in government programs, including one by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. September 17 Business Insider published an analysis of Romney’s budget plan; they found that the national debt would exceed the size of the economy within a decade if the US government implemented his proposal; even if the economy grows more quickly than is likely, the Romney budget would increase both the national debt and budget deficit. And, because Romney has made a number of contradictory claims about his budget plan the Business Insider (BI) sought to reconcile them in their analysis. For example, he claims that he plans to slash all marginal tax rates by 20% while raising the same amount of tax revenue as before -- but as the Tax Policy Center and others have noted, this appears impossible without raising taxes on the middle class; Romney has not singled out any tax loopholes that he hopes to close as president and claims that he will slash government spending by 18% though he has not identified any government programs (other than Obama care and PBS) that he wants to eliminate. BI said Romney has repeatedly blamed President Obama for the explosion in size of the national debt while failing to note that the debt and deficit have grown mostly because of the recession -- not specific spending policies.

The Economic Policy Institute September 27 found that if Romney maintains his promise to balance the budget while also providing the huge tax cuts, his plan would “lead to employment losses of 608,000 in 2013 and roughly 1.3 million in 2014; Government spending cuts of this magnitude would constitute an economic shock even larger than the one inflicted by the bursting of the housing bubble—a shock that led to the worst recession since the Great Depression.”