Mitt Romney's tax proposals would whack spending on non-defense programs far deeper than Ryan's plan

with House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's disastrous austerity plan that the Congressman received widespread paeans for until people started examining how messed up it was, even in the arithmetic department. That association was made in Iowa and New Hampshire primarily to assure the voters that, yes, the new Mitt Romney, is, in fact, a real conservative, nothing like the health care reforming, pro-choice, pro-immigration, gun-free, climate-change-believing old Romney.

by Richard Kogan and Paul N. Van de Water at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Romney's budget proposals are even more draconian than the Wisconsin Republican's. His plan, as announced on the campaign trail, would cut taxes, put a ceiling on total spending, raise the Pentagon's budget and balance the budget. Consequences?

If policymakers exempted Social Security from the cuts and then cut all other nondefense programs by the same percentage, the cuts would rise to 30 percent in 2016 and 54 percent in 2021.

For nondefense discretionary programs, these cuts would come on top of the 17-percent cut already in law due to the discretionary funding caps of the Budget Control Act that Congress enacted last August and the automatic cuts (or "sequestration") scheduled to start in January 2013. Our estimates of the depth of cuts that the Romney proposals would require are consistent with what Governor Romney himself has said about the required cuts.

They would shrink nondefense discretionary spending—which, over the past 30 years, has averaged 3.

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