Mitt Romney's severely conservative budget would severely hurt poor

Mitt Romney goes severe.
This must be what Mitt Romney meant when he called himself "severely conservative": He'd slash budgets beyond the tea party's wildest dreams. While there's not an actual formal budget out of the Romney campaign, HuffPo's Andrew Taylor reviewed campaign documents and Romney's statements to get a fuller, bleak, picture of the Romney budget.

First and foremost, defense spending would be increased, while non-defense programs would incur "larger cuts than those called for in the tightfisted GOP budget that the House passed last month." More severe than Ryan? Yes, more severe than Ryan. He would cut $500 billion overall in his target year, 2016. He'd increase defense spending by $100 billion, so to make up that, and to prevent any Social Security and Medicare cuts to current beneficiaries (that's how he tries to protect himself from senior voters, putting cuts off to the next bunch), here's what would get slashed:

• Medicaid:

  Like House Republicans, Romney promises to transform Medicaid into block grants for states and shed federal supervision of it. He would cap the program's annual growth to inflation plus a percentage point. His campaign says the approach would unshackle states to innovate and, by the end of a decade, cut costs by more than $200 billion a year.

  Ryan's budget would cut off as many as 27 million people'many of them children'from the program in the next decade. Romney's cuts are deeper.
• Non-health domestic programs, including "health research; NASA; transportation; homeland security; education; food inspection; housing and heating subsidies for the poor; food aid for pregnant women; the FBI; grants to local governments; national parks; and veterans' health care."

  Romney promises to immediately cut them by 5 percent. But they would have to be cut more than 20 percent to meet his overall budget goals, assuming veterans' health care is exempted. It's almost unthinkable that lawmakers would go along with cuts of such magnitude for air traffic control and food inspection or to agencies like NASA, the FBI, Border Patrol and the Centers for Disease Control.

  Republican lobbyist Jim Dyer says of cuts this drastic, "It's just not sustainable."
• Other safety net programs. The materials Romney has put out so far in food stamps and other nutrition programs, Supplemental Security Income for very poor seniors and the disabled, unemployment insurance, veterans' pensions, and tax credits for the working poor are vague, to say the least. Probably because, to meet his other budgetary goals, these programs would have to be all but eliminated.

  "There's good reason why Ryan's budget and the Romney budget don't have details," said Jim Horney, a budget analyst with the liberal-leaning Center on Budget and Policy priorities think tank. "If people knew what it would actually have to be done to accomplish what they're saying should be done, it's hard to imagine there would be widespread support for it."

For any pundit out there who really thinks Romney is a moderate at heart, look at the budget he's proposing. It's to the right of the Ryan budget, where you run out of adjectives to describe the degree of extreme severity.