Budget Cuts Were Mainly Smoke And Mirrors

We've heard a lot about the deal between President Obama and the Republicans in Congress (which congressional Democrats were pressured into accepting). Both sides are touting the huge cuts to the remaining months of the 2011 budget and claiming victory for either forcing or masterminding those "record-breaking" cuts. We were told the deal would cut $38 billion from the budget for the remainder of this budget period (which ends in September).

If the deal had really cut that much from the budget, it might have been worth it (although I tend to agree with the liberal Democrats in Congress that the people hurt by the deal were those people without any political power -- like the poor and children). Now it seems that, except for about $8 billion in cuts to social programs, the budget deal was mainly done with smoke and mirrors and contained very little in the way of real deficit cuts.

The Congressional Budget Office (a non-partisan group that looks at the monetary effects of legislation) says that actually only about $352 million in real cuts to the budget happened. They arrived at that figure after reading the actual bill written after the deal was struck. How can that be? Isn't that less than 1% of the budget savings that the president and Republican leaders had touted? Were we lied to?

While they didn't outright lie, they didn't tell the whole truth either. According to the CBO, most of the billions the deal was supposed to cut was money that was very unlikely to have been spent anyway, and billions more was cut from slow-spending accounts (like water & sewer grants) that won't have any immediate impact on the deficit.

The only real cuts made were a $1 billion cut to Pell Grants for college students and an $8 billion cut to social programs helping American hurting due to the recession. But even these cuts, as hurtful as they were, won't help lower the deficit -- because they turned right around and gave that money to the military. That's right. The military budget not only avoided getting cut, it came out with an extra $8 billion dollars!

In the final analysis the American people were snookered once again. The Republicans promised to cut the deficit by $100 billion (after increasing it by nearly $400 billion with their tax cuts for the rich), and the president said the most that could be cut was $38 billion. After all their talk the deficit was reduced by only $352 million -- a mere drop in the bucket compared to the year's deficit (and even less when compared to the national debt).

I'm pretty disgusted about the whole affair. If hurtful cuts have to be made to social programs then I want every penny of those cuts to go to deficit reduction. That simply did not happen. The American people should be angry -- very angry.