There Are No Spending Cuts

Look, I just want to be clear here: when Obama and the Democrats talk about two or three or four trillion dollars in spending cuts over ten years, they are lying.

They propose to increase spending, not decrease it.

The total budget is currently less than four trillion dollars. If they proposed four trillion dollars in actual cuts, then we would have no spending less. So they aren't proposing that, obviously.

What they propose is to reduce the total deficits by that much over the next ten years. And that's not even very impressive, because it's compounded annually. If you cut a $100 billion program, that's $1 trillion over ten years. So you just need to cut $400 billion in the first year, and you're done cutting.

Considering we're well over a trillion dollars in the hole this year, cutting $400 billion from the budget seems completely lame.

Now, since Obama hasn't released any specifics, we don't know how this would actually play out. My guess is that it would be significantly cutting the rate of growth almost entirely across the board, so in year one you'd see maybe a hundred billion less than what you would've had ... but still a big net increase in spending over 10 years, and probably over every individual year.

The bottom line is that Obama is proposing tax increases, debt increases, and spending increases. And we are supposed to think that he's compromising? I want spending to be less in ten years than it is now. Heck, if we just spent the same amount every year, over the next ten years, in actual dollars -- not adjusted for inflation -- that would be a cut, and I'd be happy with it. We'd catch up with spending, and start to pay down the debt. I'd be willing to compromise on both the debt and taxes, if it meant that our spending would be actually cut.

But under Obama's proposal, our spending will continue to increase, as will our taxes and debt. Let's not pretend otherwise.