April 11, 2011 9:20AM # “The Largest Annual Spending Cut in Our History”? By [David Boaz](https://www.cato.org/people/david-boaz) --- SHARE In [this week’s Britannica column](http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2011/04/biggest-cut-history-long-shot/), 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](http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/973560/Barack-Obama) [said](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/us/politics/10budget.html?ref=politics). Speaker of the House [John Boehner](http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1549291/John-A-Boehner) [called it](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/09/us/politics/09fiscal.html?ref=politics) 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](http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/reid-says-impasse-based-on-abortion-funding-boehner-denies-it/2011/04/08/AFO40U1C_story.html) that Obama “said the cuts would be painful but necessary.” > > > NPR’s Andrea Seabrook [reported](http://www.npr.org/2011/04/10/135289377/budget-fights-ahead-offer-gop-opportunities), “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](https://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/v32n3/cpr32n3-1.pdf) 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. [Read it all here](http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2011/04/biggest-cut-history-long-shot/). ##### Related Tags [Government and Politics](https://www.cato.org/government-politics), [Tax and Budget Policy](https://www.cato.org/tax-budget-policy) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).