Republicans Offer Spending Cut Plan That’s Less Than 1% Of Obama’s Budget

This is why the GOP is lost in the wilderness right now.

As I note in a recent New York Post op-ed Republicans are fond of implying that President Obama is a big-spending socialist. But the House GOP recently offered a spending cut plan that was able to find savings worth less than one percent of Obama’s budget.
As Tad DeHaven and Brian Riedl have also pointed out, the GOP spending reform effort is rather pathetic. It proposed specific annual budget cuts of about $14 billion per year.
Consider that the center-left budget wonks at the Brookings Institution put their heads together a few years ago and came up with a “smaller government plan” that proposed about $342 billion in annual spending cuts (by 2014). The Brookings authors note:

These cuts are achieved by reducing government subsidies to commercial activities ($138 billion); by returning responsibility for education, housing, training, environmental, and law enforcement programs to the states ($123 billion) . . . by cutting entitlements such as Medicaid, Social Security, and Medicare ($74 billion); and by eliminating some wasteful spending in these entitlement programs ($7 billion).

Thus, the Brookings scholars found cuts more than twenty times larger than the House GOP leadership cuts, and Brookings proposed its plan back when the deficit was about one-fifth of the size it is today. (Note that both the Brookings and GOP plans would also put a cap on overall nondefense discretionary spending, in addition to these specific cuts).

So, basically, a liberal policy think tank came up with a better package of spending cuts than the House Republicans did. And did it when there was a whole lot less wasteful government spending going on in Washington than there is now.
Pathetic.
Republicans are going to stay lost in the wilderness until they can offer policies that contrast sharply with those being offered by the liberals. Not policies that are just moderately different. Because why vote for Democrats Lite by casting your ballots for the GOP when you can elect real Democrats?