Romney to drown government in bathtub?

As an earnest of  Mitt Romney's intellectual honesty, note the way he contrasts his future budgeting with Obama's in his campaign launch speech in Stratham, NH today:

Government under President Obama has grown to consume almost 40% of our economy. We are only inches away from ceasing to be a free market economy. I will cap federal spending at 20% or less of the GDP and finally, finally balance the budget.

Sounds like he'll cut spending in half, doesn't it? Except that he is, natch, comparing an apple and an orange.

Combined federal, state and local taxes have been pegged at 39.97% of  GDP in 2010 -- by what looks to me a  dubious source (albeit cited by wikipedia): a certain Christopher Chantrill at usgovernmentspending.com , a site devoted in large part to highlighting the wonders of the Ryan budget. The number includes a self-described guesstimate of state and local taxes.   Dubious or not, according to the same source, the figure stood at 36.94% in 2008 and at 34.73% in 1988, the last year of Reagan's term. Given that over 90% of economists accept the imperative to raise government spending during an economic downturn, the 2010 figure hardly represents a dramatic surge to within inches away from ceasing to be a free market economy. The last time total government spending was at Romney's implied target, 20% of GDP, was 1940, according to Chantrill. Guess Romney's going to drown government in the bathtub?

Not exactly.  Romney promises to cut federal spending to 20% of GDP -- echoing the Ryan plan, whose authors proudly contrast it to Obama's budget as follows: 

Brings government spending to below 20 percent of the economy, a sharp contrast to the President’s budget, in which spending never falls below 23 percent of GDP over the next decade.

And that's in contrast to Obama's 2012 budget, since superseded by the White House's long-term deficit reduction plan, which proposes some $2 trillion in spending reductions over ten years.  We're talking 20% vs. perhaps 21-22% here -- hardly a last-ditch rollback of the red tide. Never mind that balancing the budget within the course of a two-term presidency is essentially impossible.

That's not to say that the differences in proposed spending between the Obama and Ryan plans are not dramatic. But it's the Ryan plan that's truly radical, promising to end Medicare and Medicaid as we know them and reduce federal spending to 14% of GDP by 2050, a level not seen since the early 1950s. Does  Romney's short-term 20% target suggest a similar trajectory? If so, good luck wrapping the flag around a Ryanesque budget.

Greg Sargent puts his finger on the line of attack that Romney's budgetary sleight-of-hand serves:

Romney signaled early on that Obama’s cultural identity and understanding and appreciation of America would be central to the 2012 campaign, and here he’s suggesting that Obama has transformed our economy into something no longer recognizably American.

Creating the impression that Obama has raised spending to unAmerican levels is of course central to this disgusting scare narrative.

A gloss on a 'quote of the day'

The Dish frames up an emotionally satisfying reality check from  Joe Klein:

"It's painful when reality intrudes. Here is the reality: the Republicans have spent the past 30 years creating deficits and the Democrats have spent the past 30 years closing them. The unimportance of deficits became an article of faith during the second Bush Administration: "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter," Dick Cheney famously said. It has been rather hilarious for those of us with even a minimal grasp of recent history to watch these folks pull fierce 180-degree turns on the issue--and it is even more hilarious to watch them accuse Obama of hyper-partisanship after the dump-truck full of garbage they visited upon his head these past few years."

Klein was reacting to Republican fulminations such as this from Pete Wehner (link in the Klein post):

President Obama's speech today was both outrageous and insulting, a practically perfect combination of demagoguery and shallowness. It was not a serious substantive speech; it was a political missile whose intention is was to destroy, through libel, the House Republican's 2012 budget. It was not an effort to engage in a serious discussion; it was an effort to create a cartoon image of Obama's critics.

I suspect that whatever else Americans of any political stripe think of Obama, they know he's no rhetorical flame-thrower.  In a battle over which side is excessively partisan, he wins -- poll after poll shows that Americans trust him to compromise far more than they do the Republicans.  For a second reality check, note that in this speech Obama partially offset his "partisan" attack -- that is,  a frank expose of the Ryan Plan's values and likely effects, and a short history lesson about the debt amassed in the 80s and naughties --  with a sharing of credit for the deficit reduction successes in between:

To meet this challenge, our leaders came together three times during the 1990s to reduce our nation's deficit -- three times. They forged historic agreements that required tough decisions made by the first President Bush, then made by President Clinton, by Democratic Congresses and by a Republican Congress. All three agreements asked for shared responsibility and shared sacrifice. But they largely protected the middle class; they largely protected our commitment to seniors; they protected our key investments in our future.

That is in service of his apparent continued belief that he can, against all the odds, strike a deficit deal with Republicans today: