My Blog Posts

• Mitt Romney: The Two Trillion Dollar Man
  02/27/2012 10:02:57 AM EST
  Budget austerity has become the topic de jour throughout Washington as members of Congress, the White House, Pentagon officials, and interest groups debate how to approach the future with fewer resources. Republican presidential candidate and former Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney believes that he has a solution, and it includes spending an additional $2 trillion on the defense budget over the next decade. Governor Romney has proposed a cap on federal spending at 20% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the most widely used method of measuring the size of the economy, extending 2001-2003 tax cuts permanently, eliminating taxation of investment income of most individual taxpayers, reducing the corporate income tax, eliminating the estate tax, repealing taxes enacted by the 2010 healthcare reform legislation, and balancing the federal budget. Romney has also proposed increasing the defense budget to at minimum 4% of GDP and increasing the number active duty of military service persons by 100,000. If implemented, this plan would limit non-defense discretionary spending to 1.7% of GDP by 2021, though it has never fallen below 3.2% of GDP in the past. But what would that cut really mean? Richard Kogan and Paul N. Van de Water, senior fellows for Federal Fiscal Policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, have done the arithmetic and found that the necessary budget cuts to meet the goals of Romney’s plan would be massive. If Social Security and Medicare were exempted, 38.1% cuts would be needed in discretionary programs by 2016 with 56% cuts by 2022. If Social Security and Medicare are included proportionally in the reduction of non-defense spending, non-defense federal programs would be cut by 19.6% in 2016 and 26.5% in 2022.
• What the Candidates Got Wrong in the Latest GOP Debate
  01/27/2012 10:31:22 AM EST
  On Monday night, the Republican candidates for President met in Tampa, Florida to spar over peddling influence, debate tax returns, and generally confuse the American public about the supposed decline of the United States Navy and the bankruptcy of the Obama administration’s policy toward Iran. During the debate, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney said: "Our Navy is now smaller than any time since 1917." Though it is true that the United States Navy has seen fluctuations in the total number of ships over the past 95 years, the United States Navy is still by far the most advanced and most powerful navy in the world. It also turns out the Navy was smaller than today at the end of Fiscal Years 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008. In 2009, when the Navy had 285 active surface ships (the same as today), then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wrote in Foreign Affairs (Jan/Feb 2009, Vol. 88 Issue 1, p28-40) that: “As much as the U.S. Navy has shrunk since the end of the Cold War, for example, in terms of tonnage, its battle fleet is still larger than the next 13 navies combined — and 11 of those 13 navies are U.S. allies or partners.”