In this week’s Britannica column, I look at the claims being made for the budget cuts in the weekend deal:
“The largest annual spending cut in our history,” President Obama said. Speaker of the House John Boehner called it the “largest real dollar spending cut in American history.” Saturday’s front‐page, upper‐right headline in the Washington Post proclaimed:
BIGGEST CUTS
IN U.S. HISTORY
The story went on to say that Obama “said the cuts would be painful but necessary.”
NPR’s Andrea Seabrook reported, “The Republicans got big, big cuts.”
And are they?
Please. It’s a cut of $38 billion in a budget of $3,819 billion. That’s 1 percent. That’s a rounding error in federal budgeting.…
That same budget table shows that federal spending fell from $92.7 billion in 1945 to $55.2 billion in 1946, to $34.5 billion in 1947, and to $29.8 billion in 1948 (and all without any of the job losses that we’re told would result from modest reductions today). Check out also the drop in spending from 1919 to 1922, even larger in percentage terms.…
The fundamental point here is that federal spending rose by more than a trillion dollars during Bush’s first seven years, and then by almost another trillion in barely three fiscal years. And then we had a titanic battle over whether to trim $38 billion.
The idea that the Democrats “have shown that they heard the message that government spends too much” or that the Republicans—the party that increased federal spending by a trillion dollars while nobody was looking during the Bush years—have “imposed a small‐government agenda on Washington” is ludicrous.