(Center on Budget and Policy Priorities)

For a couple of months, Mitt Romney has been indirectly associating himself with House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's disastrous austerity plan that the Congressman received widespread paeans for until people started examining how messed up it was, even in the arithmetic department. That association was made in Iowa and New Hampshire primarily to assure the voters that, yes, the new Mitt Romney, is, in fact, a real conservative, nothing like the health care reforming, pro-choice, pro-immigration, gun-free, climate-change-believing old Romney.

Thing is, according to a new assessment by Richard Kogan and Paul N. Van de Water at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Romney's budget proposals are even more draconian than the Wisconsin Republican's. His plan, as announced on the campaign trail, would cut taxes, put a ceiling on total spending, raise the Pentagon's budget and balance the budget. Consequences? Big chunks hacked out of nondefense programs:

If policymakers exempted Social Security from the cuts and then cut all other nondefense programs by the same percentage, the cuts would rise to 30 percent in 2016 and 54 percent in 2021. For nondefense discretionary programs, these cuts would come on top of the 17-percent cut already in law due to the discretionary funding caps of the Budget Control Act that Congress enacted last August and the automatic cuts (or "sequestration") scheduled to start in January 2013. Our estimates of the depth of cuts that the Romney proposals would require are consistent with what Governor Romney himself has said about the required cuts. [...] They would shrink nondefense discretionary spending—which, over the past 30 years, has averaged 3.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) and never fallen below 3.2 percent—to just 1.7 percent of GDP by 2021.

Specifically, what would this mean? It depends, of course, on what gets rescued. Throw out the balanced budget proposal (whose inclusion would make things far worse) and cut all programs proportionally and one consequence would be a cut in Social Security of $161 billion for 2016. The total Social Security cut for 2014-2021 would be $1.5 trillion. That means the average monthly benefit check would drop from $1,230 to $1,020. And that means 2.6 million more Americans below the poverty line.

But Romney has suggested he would not change Social Security benefits for anyone already retired or age 55 and older. He, after all, needs the votes in that demographic. So without cutting those benefits, other nondefense spending would have to be cut een deeper, by an average of 24 percent, according to Kogan and Van de Water. Across the board, this would mean:

• In 2016, Medicare gets chopped by $153 billion, and a total of $1.4 trillion through 2021. Consequences, either reduced access to medical care if fees for doctors and hospitals are reduced, or higher premiums for beneficiaries, or both.

(Center on Budget and Policy Priorities)

• Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) be whacked for $946 billion through 2021. If these savings were achieved by repealing the health-care reforms, it would mean 34 million people who would gain coverage under the reform would be uninsured.

• Reductions in spending for food stamps would take food off the table for 10 million Americans or the amount recipients could receive would be vastly reduced, or some combination of these would be imposed. Most affected: children (who make up 47 percent of food stamp recipients, the elderly and disabled).

• Compensation payments for disabled veterans now averaging under $13,000 a year would be cut by a fourth. Also cut by this amount would be pensions for low-income veterans now averaging about $11,000 a year and Supplemental Security Income benefits for aged and disabled individuals now averaging about $6,000 a year.

• There would also be cuts in "aid to elementary and secondary education, veterans' health care, law enforcement, national parks, environmental protection, and biomedical and scientific research. Nondefense discretionary spending would shrink to 2.2 percent of GDP by 2016 and 1.7 percent of GDP by 2021. In contrast," say according to Kogan and Van de Water, "spending for this category has averaged 3.7 percent of GDP over the past 30 years and has never gone below 3.2 percent of GDP during this period."

That's what the guy who, nationally speaking, was still the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination until the latest Gallup Poll came out, wants to do to budget while cutting the corporate tax rate, lowering taxes on wealthy individuals and sticking it to the middle class. That's not new. It's been top of the Republican agenda for more than three decades. But Romney would plunge the knife the deepest yet.