Josh Barro, Columnist

Why the Republican Party Won’t Name Its Spending Cuts

December 12, 2012 at 9:01 PM UTC

Josh Barro is the lead writer for the Ticker, Bloomberg View's blog on economics, finance and politics. His primary areas of interest include tax and fiscal policy, state and local government, and planning and land use. Previously, Barro was a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a commercial real estate banker at Wells Fargo. He holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Harvard and lives in Queens, New York.

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Jonathan Chait looks at why Republicans are being cagey about what exact spending cuts they want as part of the fiscal-cliff deal. His conclusion (that the Republican Party doesn't actually have big spending cuts that it wants) isn't quite right:

When the only cuts on the table would inflict real harm on people with modest incomes and save small amounts of money, that is a sign that there’s just not much money to save. It’s not just that Republicans disagree with this; they don’t seem to understand it. The absence of a Republican spending proposal is not just a negotiating tactic but a howling void where a specific grasp of the role of government ought to be. And negotiating around that void is extremely hard to do. The spending cuts aren't there because they can’t be found.