What Romney cuts

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney was in Iowa yesterday, promising, among other things, big cuts in federal spending. Including cutting subsidies for public TV, Amtrak, the NEA, etc., block granting social programs to states and slicing fed jobs.

WaPo's Ezra Klein digs down into his plans:

It's important to remember that Romney's budget is much, much more aggressive than Ryan's. It's less specific, so it gets less attention. But it's much more aggressive. Ryan's got about $5.3 trillion in cuts. Romney's looking for $7 trillion. And he's not keeping Ryan and Obama's Medicare savings. And he's increasing spending on defense by much more than Ryan does. So to pay for that defense spending and make up the Medicare cuts, he needs about $1.5 trillion more in cuts from the non-Medicare, non-defense side of the budget than Ryan has.

To make Romney's numbers add up, you have to assume that by the end of his presidency, Romney will have cut every federal program that's not Medicare, Social Security or defense spending by 57 percent.

I don't assume he's going to do that. I assume Mitt Romney's budget is a fantasy and it's never going to happen.

When Romney does talk spending cuts, he tends to focus on things like repealing Obamacare, privatizing Amtrak, cutting arts funding and ending subsidies for Planned Parenthood. Whatever you think of those programs, repealing Obamacare increases the deficit and the others are rounding errors.

But when Romney gets kind of serious, the big categories he identifies for cuts - and I'm quoting from his speech in Detroit here - are Medicaid, food stamps, housing subsidies and job training. Programs for the poor, in other words.