How Republican budgets hide huge spending cuts in “block grants"
http://www.vox.com/2015/3/16/8226165/block-grants-medicaid-budget
At the Wall Street Journal, Kristina Peterson reports that the Senate GOP's upcoming budget will call for "block granting" Medicaid and food stamps. It's a really helpful article, but it includes a paragraph that's frustratingly common in press coverage of the GOP's various block grant proposals:
To get a sense of potential savings, under last years House GOP budget, converting the food-stamp programs into a block grant starting in 2019 would have saved $125 billion over 10 years. The document also estimated that overhauling Medicaid would trim $732 billion over a decade.
Republicans often use block grants to hide massive spending cuts, and you can see why in the language Peterson uses. If Republicans simply proposed cutting Medicaid by hundreds of billions of dollars, then the cuts would be described as, well, cuts, possibly with the word "draconian" in front of them. But tucking them behind block grants leads to gentler "saved."
The reality is block grants don't save money. But they're routinely used to hide the thing that does save money, which is fixed funding formulas that require huge spending cuts. That's how the Republican budget actually saves money in Medicaid and food stamps.