The "Cut, Cap and Balance Act"  is a bill that will slash, crush and topple the pillars of economic security and job growth for millions of Americans.

The fact that the vote on this legislati9on largely an ideological exercise on the part of House Republicans—it has no chance of passing the Senate in anything close to its present form, and the White House issued a strongly worded veto message—does not make it any less important. That's because this legislation goes a long way toward setting up an important debate for the middle class between today's conservative vision for America and the progressive alternative that will lead the nation out of its economic crisis. 

Robert Greenstein at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities writes that the legislation "stands out as one of the most ideologically extreme pieces of major budget legislation to come before Congress in years, if not decades." 

This legislation would not only requires a wholesale gutting of domestic spending programs in health care, education, the environment, economic development and aid to those in need, but would chisel into stone the Republican Party's manic opposition to anything that would increase revenues into the federal treasury. As Greenstein put it in his analysis, "an impoverished elderly widow living on Supplemental Security Income — which provides benefits that lift people to just 75 percent of the poverty line — could have her assistance cut back under the measure’s across-the-board budget cuts even as millionaire hedge-fund managers retained their lucrative carried-interest tax breaks."

The $111 billion in cuts from the administration's $3.7 trillion 2012 budget would do direct harm to economic growth, job-creation and economic security to those who are struggling to recover from the recession. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that this alone would lower by 700,000 the number of jobs created and cut economic growth by nearly three-quarters of 1 percent. And these effects would get worse as the legislation inexorably pushes the federal government closer to the Grover Norquist vision of being small enough to be drowned in a bathtub.

The slashing, crushing and toppling of government programs that this legislation would require would end up being worse than what was required by House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan's devastating budget plan, with its privatization of Medicare and its conversion of Medicaid into a diminished block grant to the states. 

Notwithstanding the claims made by its sponsors, the so-called "cut, cap and balance" bill would not only require the kind of dismantling of Medicare that Ryan envisioned (an annual voucher for private insurance that would lose value when health care cost increases exceeded the rate of inflation) but would make cuts in Social Security benefits and an increase in the retirement age inevitable. That's true of Social Security because the one significant action Congress could take to make the Social Security trust fund solvent for at least the next 75 years—lift the payroll tax cap—would be virtually off limits.

As the Center for American Progress notes, the measure would in 10 years shrink government spending to the proportion of the economy it was in 1966—the year that seniors were first able to sign up for Medicare and one year after Medicaid went to effect. According to Michael Ettlinger and Michael Linden at the Center for American Progress, getting spending down to the level envisioned in his legislation would require 25 percent cuts in every government program, including the Pentagon and Social Security. But, since conservatives would never allow defense spending to be cut that deeply, and most conservatives would reject Social Security cuts that were that deep as well, the effect would most likely be cuts that could average as high as 67 percent in the programs that affect the lives of middle-class Americans—from education aid to food inspections to environmental protection to medical research.

What the legislation does not do is change the America of of 2021 or 2011 into the America of 1966, and that is what makes the idea of rolling government spending to 18 percent of GDP impractical as well as devastating in its effects. America today is older (Nearly 13 percent is over 65 today, compared to just over 9 percent in 1966) and spends more than five times as much on health care today as it did in 1966. (See this chart.)

The America envisioned under this legislation is an America that does not invest in its future or its people. Its federal government would stand on the sidelines as its public schools crumbled, its universities continued to price themselves beyond the reach of middle-class families, its infrastructure decayed, its research fell behind that of the rest of the industrialized world and its people became increasingly impoverished, in spirit if not financially. It is indeed the most radical transformation of America that the mainstream of the Republican Party has ever put forward—a world where the rich are unfettered in their quest for ever larger shares of wealth and the middle class is officially abandoned. This is a vision of America's future that the American middle-class majority rejects.