What Paul Ryan’s budget actually cuts — and by how much
What Paul Ryan’s budget actually cuts — and by how much
Posted by Brad Plumer at 03:15 PM ET, 03/20/2012 TheWashingtonPost
Paul Ryan’s budget would spend $5.3 trillion less over the next decade than President Obama’s budget. Part of this is health care: Ryan would trim Medicare and Medicaid for a portion of his savings. But he’d also spend $2.2 trillion less on everything else. So what, specifically, is Ryan planning to cut?
Paul Ryan’s budget would cut transportation spending 38 percent, compared with the White House’s budget. (Elaine Thompson/AP) The clearest way to figure this out is to look at the “Chairman’s mark”: This is the version of Ryan’s budget that’s in legislative language and gives specific forecasts for spending by government function. You can see them in table form at the end of his bill (pdf) and then compare them with the White House’s Table 32-1 here. Exciting, right?
Over the next decade, Ryan would spend 30 percent less than the White House on “income security” programs for the poor — that’s everything from food stamps to housing assistance to the earned-income tax credit. (Ryan’s budget would spend $4.8 trillion over this timeframe; the White House’s would spend $6.8 trillion.) Compared with Obama, Ryan would spend 38 percent less on transportation and 24 percent less on veterans. He’d spend 20 percent less on “General science, space, and basic technology.” And, compared with the White House, he’d cut “Education, training, employment, and social services” by a full 44 percent.
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Alternatively, we can look at what specific cuts might ensue in the near future. Third Way, for instance, has tried to game out the effects of Congress’ recent debt-ceiling deal on specific government programs. The cuts to domestic spending, if applied across the board, would lead to fewer food inspectors, fewer air-traffic controllers, and so forth. And that would mean more delays and cases of food poisoning, and so forth. And Ryan’s budget, for its part, goes even deeper than Congress’s debt-ceiling deal.
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Likewise, spending on natural resources and the environment will be 14.6 percent lower in 2014 under Ryan’s budget than it is today. Assuming those cuts hit all programs equally — and, again, this is for illustration purposes — then, Kendall finds, “our weather forecasts would be only half as accurate for four to eight years until another polar satellite is launched. For many people planning a weekend outdoors, they may have to wait until Thursday for a forecast as accurate as one they now get on Monday. … Perhaps most affected would be hurricane response. Governors and mayors would have to order evacuations for areas twice as large or wait twice as long for an accurate forecast.”
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