Joshua Holland: 10 Awful Things President Mitt Romney Would Do

With the polls showing a tightening race, a Mitt Romney presidency is becoming a real possibility. As I write, New York Times polling guru Nate Silver gives the Republican a 29 percent chance of emerging victorious when the votes are cast in just under two weeks. The Romney Ryan campaign has offered a bewildering and often contradictory array of positions on the issues, which makes predicting what a Romney agenda might look like exceptionally difficult. What's more, we'd see a very different Romney administration if Democrats retain control of the Senate. Silver gives them an 88 percent chance of doing so, projecting Dems to hold 52.4 seats in the next Congress - it's highly unlikely they'll win the House. 1. The Romney Ryan Budget Let's assume for a moment, that the Republicans take the Senate. Mitt Romney has at times embraced Paul Ryan's "road-map" and he's also distanced himself from it, but there will be quite a bit of pressure from conservative activists and the Republican House to enact something along the lines of the road-map. There are two things to understand about Paul Ryan's budget. First, it has been carefully written, so that most of its provisions can be passed under a process known as budget reconciliation, which requires only a simple majority of votes in the Senate. Second, it is a right wing fantasy that, if enacted as written, would trigger a major drop in employment, and send the economy into a tailspin. It cuts are so deep, and would effect so many constituents, that it would have to be modified. It's one thing to campaign on such a plan, and another to govern with it. What does it do? According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, by 2050, most of the federal government aside from Social Security, Medicaid, the the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and interest payments to just 3.75 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) by 2050. Since, as CBO notes, "spending for defense alone has not been lower than 3 percent of GDP in any year since World War II" and Ryan seeks a high level of defense spending, he increases defense funding by $228 billion over the next ten years above the pre sequestration baseline, the rest of government would largely have to disappear. That includes everything from veterans' programs to medical and scientific research, highways, education, nearly all programs for low income families and individuals other than Medicaid, national parks, border patrols, protection of food safety and the water supply, law enforcement, and the like.