sailingaway
01-05-2012, 09:43 AM
"If you look at most politicians talking about cuts, they are very, very, very short on specifics with a few exceptions," said Tad DeHaven, a budget analyst at the CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank that advocates for smaller government.
On the hunt for specific budget cuts, DeHaven combed through the economic plans listed on each candidate's campaign website.
He came away disappointed -- with one exception.
"From a spending standpoint, there is Ron Paul and then everybody else," DeHaven said. "You have a complete budget from Paul, and not much from anybody else."
Paul's plan doesn't lack ambition. He wants to eliminate the Departments of Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Commerce, Interior and Education.
And on his website, Paul lays out a four-year plan with budget lines for federal agencies and programs that he wants to eliminate with a high degree of specificity.
By way of contrast, Romney and Santorum list only a few programs they want to axe, despite their big promises.
Romney wants to cut funding for relatively small programs like Amtrak, the National Endowment for the Arts, foreign aid, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Title X family planning.
He does detail a few bigger ticket items, like a reduction in the size of the federal workforce and a modification to Medicaid that would turn it into a block grant program -- but not much else.
Overall, DeHaven said Romney's specific cuts are "tiny" and "the typical small stuff."
Santorum doesn't fare much better, focusing on red-meat Republican priorities like funding cuts for the National Labor Relations Board, USAID, Planned Parenthood and the Environmental Protection Agency.
He clearly doesn't want to point out that Ron's steep cuts have the impact of allowing him to NOT cut Social Security and Medicare while letting kids who haven't yet paid in opt out, or maybe CNN just didn't want to print it....
http://money.cnn.com/2012/01/05/news/economy/budget_cuts/
On the hunt for specific budget cuts, DeHaven combed through the economic plans listed on each candidate's campaign website.
He came away disappointed -- with one exception.
"From a spending standpoint, there is Ron Paul and then everybody else," DeHaven said. "You have a complete budget from Paul, and not much from anybody else."
Paul's plan doesn't lack ambition. He wants to eliminate the Departments of Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Commerce, Interior and Education.
And on his website, Paul lays out a four-year plan with budget lines for federal agencies and programs that he wants to eliminate with a high degree of specificity.
By way of contrast, Romney and Santorum list only a few programs they want to axe, despite their big promises.
Romney wants to cut funding for relatively small programs like Amtrak, the National Endowment for the Arts, foreign aid, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Title X family planning.
He does detail a few bigger ticket items, like a reduction in the size of the federal workforce and a modification to Medicaid that would turn it into a block grant program -- but not much else.
Overall, DeHaven said Romney's specific cuts are "tiny" and "the typical small stuff."
Santorum doesn't fare much better, focusing on red-meat Republican priorities like funding cuts for the National Labor Relations Board, USAID, Planned Parenthood and the Environmental Protection Agency.
He clearly doesn't want to point out that Ron's steep cuts have the impact of allowing him to NOT cut Social Security and Medicare while letting kids who haven't yet paid in opt out, or maybe CNN just didn't want to print it....
http://money.cnn.com/2012/01/05/news/economy/budget_cuts/