Budget Deal May Collapse

04-12-2011 • EconomicPolicyJournal.com

It turns out that so much smoke and mirrors was used to create the minuscule $38.5 billion in budget cuts, during the ciricus act budget negotiations, that the real cuts are, get this, microscopic: somewhere between $8 and $14 billion. This may wake up enough of the masses before the House votes on the bill, so that some House members may be afraid to vote for the budget and not enough votes will exist for passage. Neocon John Podhoretz who eats and drinks with members (usually in an effort to promote wars) explains: The big news today is that the $38.5 billion in budget cuts announced with such fanfare on Friday night mostly aren’t real. A good deal of it involves money from previous years and previous budgets that hasn’t actually been spent. As the AP puts it, the budget deal is financed with a lot of one-time savings and cuts that officially ‘score’ as savings to pay for spending elsewhere, but that often have little to no actual impact on the deficit…cuts to earmarks, unspent census money, leftover federal construction funding, and $2.5 billion from the most recent renewal of highway programs that can’t be spent because of restrictions set by other legislation. Another $3.5 billion comes from unused spending authority from a program providing health care to children of lower-income families. The total amount actually cut appears to be somewhere between $8 and $14 billion.