What is Cut, Cap and Balance?

The Republican "Cut, Cap and Balance" plan for addressing the tendency of government budgets to increase towards infinity passed the House yesterday. President Obama has said he would veto at least an earlier version, and Rhode Island Representatives James Langevin and David Cicilline both voted against it.

Title I of the bill is the cut, which would be an immediate cut in the 2012 Federal spending total Various news reports place the size of the cut at $111 billion. The direct language in the bill says that spending on Social Security, Medicare, veterans’ benefits, net interest on the debt would be exempt from cuts, and spending on the global war on terrorism would have its own cap.

In March, Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation, using numbers from the Office of Management and Budget, estimated a total of $3.7 trillion in outlays to be made by the Federal government in 2012 (including interest on the debt). According to his numbers, the exempted programs account for about $1.8 trillion, which means that the $111 billion in cuts will have to come from a total of about $1.9 trillion from the remaining programs, a cut of about 6%.

Title II is the cap: An annual federal spending cap, as a percetange of total GDP, would be phased in. The schedule would be...

21.7 percent for fiscal year 2013;
20.8 percent for fiscal year 2014;
20.2 percent for fiscal year 2015;
20.1 percent for fiscal year 2016;
19.9 percent for fiscal year 2017;
19.7 percent for fiscal year 2018;
19.9 percent for fiscal year 2019;
19.9 percent for fiscal year 2020;
19.9 percent for fiscal year 2021.

If I understand blogger and former director of the President's National Economic Council Keith Hennessy correctly, the caps would be enforced by (almost) across-the board reductions in Federal spending needed to hit the targets, if an initial budget was submitted that exceeded them. It is "almost" across the board, because payments for military personnel accounts, TRICARE for Life, Medicare, military retirement, Social Security, veterans, and net interest would be exempt from the automatic reductions.

Title III is the balance: An increase in the debt-ceiling of the United States would be triggered by the passage of a balanced-budget constitutional amendment by both houses of Congress. (It would not become the law of the land, of course, until ratified by 3/4ths of state legislatures after that).

Arguably, the "balance" is a radical approach to the problem, at least in a procedural sense -- asking for a constitutional amendment to solve an immediate problem is a tall order. But that issue aside, what's radical about the "cutting" and "capping" provisions?