The most criticized element of the GOP Pledge is how little there is actually there. Specifically, what Republicans would actually cut in spending in order to bring the deficit under control and deliver promised tax cuts. Krugman:
The document repeatedly condemns federal debt — 16 times, by my count. But the main substantive policy proposal is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, which independent estimates say would add about $3.7 trillion to the debt over the next decade — about $700 billion more than the Obama administration’s tax proposals.
True, the document talks about the need to cut spending. But as far as I can see, there’s only one specific cut proposed — canceling the rest of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which Republicans claim (implausibly) would save $16 billion. That’s less than half of 1 percent of the budget cost of those tax cuts. As for the rest, everything must be cut, in ways not specified — "except for common-sense exceptions for seniors, veterans, and our troops." In other words, Social Security, Medicare and the defense budget are off-limits.
With that in mind, this morning MSNBC's Savannah Guthrie and Chuck Todd grilled Rep. Kevin McCarthy, one of the leadership team behind the pledge, for how he would cut the federal budget. He couldn't name a single program he'd cut.
ThinkProgress caught it:
GUTHRIE: Everybody likes to cut spending, but the issue is where, how? What specifically are you going to cut? [...]
MCCARTHY: What are you going to cut? Discretionary spending. Anything that’s not security...
TODD: Well, hang on. What is discretionary? Give us two or three items that are discretionary.
MCCARTHY: You could go through every different program within government, outside of entitlements, outside of national defense, that is discretionary spending that Congress has control of. That has gone over 88 percent in the last two years.
GUTHRIE; So what comes to mind for that, if you could wave a magic wand and do it unilaterally, what would you cut?
TODD: If you had the line item.
MCCARTHY: The line item would be across-the-board.
Eventually they wore him down into saying that he would cut administrative spending in Congress, which could "save $100 million. So in a $3 trillion federal budget, with a $1.3 trillion deficit, McCarthy identified $100 million in savings, reducing the deficit by less than 0.01 percent. And those savings won’t even come out of a federal program."
One more time, the Republicans come up empty.