Budget Confusion
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Budget Confusion
By: John McCormack, The Weekly Standard
Some conservatives were taken aback by the
AP's report yesterday that the continuing resolution (CR) that
cuts $38 billion will only reduce this fiscal year's deficit--i.e.
reduce total outlays through September 30--by $352
million.
Is the CR a sham? Nope, not really.
Politico's veteran congressional reporter David Rogers
explains at the end of
this story that the reduction in outlays through the next five
months was always going to be significantly less than the total
level of cuts in budget authority.
H.R. 1, the original House GOP budget that was supported by Tea
Parters and was passed in February, had a cuts-to-outlay reduction
ratio of 4 to 1 for non-defense spending. The ratio for the CR
agreed to by Boehner, Reid, and Obama is 5 to 1. The CR
reduces outlays by $8.2 billion on non-defense spending through the
end of the September.
As Rogers writes:
[W]hen CBO estimated the initial House bill in February, it
projected that the $61.3 billion in nonemergency appropriations
cuts would result in $9.2 billion in outlay reductions by Sept. 30
when measured against comparable outlay estimates two months
earlier, on Dec. 20.
By comparison, the precise appropriations cut now, $37.7
billion, translates into a vastly smaller sum, $352 million, using
the same standard.
A more accurate picture can be drawn by separating out the
annual Pentagon portion of the bills.
When this is done, the House bill in February can be seen as
having truly proposed to cut more than $68 billion from largely
domestic and foreign aid appropriations. The resulting 2011 outlay
reduction forecast by CBO was about $18 billion - a roughly 4-1
ratio.
By comparison, the deal now cuts $42 billion from non-Pentagon
accounts, but the outlay reduction is about $8.2 billion - a 5-1
ratio.
This is all a little confusing, but the bottom line is that the
conservative angst over the CR seems to be much ado about
little.