The federal budget is a massive undertaking, and if you go through it you will find projects that were completed using less money than was allocated, projects that were cancelled, projects that were created by typos and that never really existed. Another way of looking at this is that the government isn’t going to spend all the money that it says it is going to spend. The budget deficit isn’t as big as the government says it is. Obviously, some projects run over budget, but the cost of those projects isn’t on the books until additional money is appropriated for them.
Back in 2011, a lot of the spending cuts that were announced were not really cuts in money that was going to be spent but the identification of money that was not going to be spent. Most of this was honest accounting. Money had been appropriated, adding to the deficit on paper but not in fact. There were some gimmicks, too. It made no sense to pretend that we were going to carry out the U.S. Census in 2011 until Congress intervened. We do the Census every ten years, and having done it in 2010, there were no savings from not doing it again the next year. Census spending went down, but not because of any deal made between the president and Congress. Still, if the game is to live within our means, discovering that we owe less money is just as good as spending less money. Put it this way. Would you rather spend $1,000 less on yourself or get a letter in the mail from VISA telling you that due to an computer glitch it turns out that you owe them $1,000 less than you thought you owed them? Regardless of your answer, you are $1,000 less in debt.
Nevertheless, the Tea Party feels like they got conned back in 2011. They feel like the administration and their own leadership conspired to pull the wool over their eyes. And so, now, they like the idea of the Sequester because it represents real cuts, not accounting tricks. This is in part because they actually did get schooled in 2011, but mostly because their goal is not economic health but ideological triumph. They want to shrink the government down to the point that it is small enough to drown in a bathtub. That’s what they want. Everyone else just wants a good economy and a healthy jobs market.
The administration says that they identified all the “low-hanging fruit” in the budget back in 2011 and that they won’t be able to cut funding as painlessly this time around. Unfortunately, the Tea Party folks are stupid and they don’t learn the correct lessons. They didn’t learn that we were less broke than they thought. They learned that the administration and their own leadership would deceive them about the nature of the cuts if they tried to negotiate line-by-line through the budget. They are so dumb that they prefer dumb cuts like the across-the-board cuts in the Sequester because they can trust and understand them.
So, now, everything is more difficult.
I’d say the con cuts both ways. The number of people who think they want to drown the government in a bathtub is several time greater than the number of people who actually want to drown the government in a bathtub. The difference of course is that these people tend not to grasp that Medicare, Social Security, and the armed forces are all parts of the government.
But this becomes much more obvious once real spending cuts are on the table, because suddenly you fins yourself looking at the parts of the government you actually like and trying to decide which ones you’re going to keep. So in fact the absence of real cuts in 2011 helped to obscure the fact that the Tea Party position is utter nonsense, and that nobody actually wants these massive cuts they’re demanding.
I wonder if our side is too stupid to learn, too.
The budget deal in early April, 2011 was the subject of a great, big freakout. It was, as I recall, proof positive that Barack Obama was a giant sellout who caved in every negotiation and embraced austerity economics.
Here are some links to what people, including front-pagers on this site, had to say about this deal back then. Some of the comments look pretty good in hindsight. Others do not.
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2011/4/8/204332/5177
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2011/4/7/184811/0104
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2011/4/9/82223/81068
To me, and what I continue to believe, the comments criticizing the deal then and now all fall under, “What is the end-game?”
If it turns out well with the sequester, defense gets significantly cut and we can figure out a way to rejigger the rest of the discretionary budget so it doesn’t take a big hit, it would have been a fine deal to make. If entitlement beneficiaries get hit at all, it will have been horrible. If the sequester goes through, it will still have been bad and harmful, but might be the only way we can get through defense cuts and break the backs of Republicans. The last point being that we eventually figure out a way to restore the discretionary budget…because it’s taken a huge beating under this Republican Congress.
And how, in retrospect, does my analysis look in those three pieces?
You come across as a guy who is keeping his head in the fog of war, and not getting ahead of himself as he tries to figure out what’s going on.
…as well as paying more attention to process and political implications than to policy.
He appears to have read specifically about the Census scam and talks multiplier-effect on federal dollars spent with the firebagger king of know-nothingism, ddayen. So that’s not nothing.
I apparently wasn’t around back then yet. I think I started posting until the summer debt ceiling stuff. I don’t remember caring about the details of the budget, myself, and was simply more mystified at the idea of the GOP shutting the government down over Planned Parenthood.
Which was 100% a thing that almost happened. How soon we forget.
They didn’t learn that we were less broke than they thought.
This is just complete nonsense all the way around. We can’t go bankrupt. We have our own currency. Anyone that says we’re broke, or close to going broke, shows that they don’t know WTF they’re talking about.
They learned that the administration and their own leadership would deceive them about the nature of the cuts if they tried to negotiate line-by-line through the budget.
Uh, yeah. Every preconceived notion about Washington they had was confirmed. The president is a partisan liar and con artist who can bend reality with his control of the media cycle. And their opposition leaders are willing co-conspirators who use their votes to achieve political power within the chamber without the intention of representing their interests.
The radicals were defeated by the status quo. They believed they were called to transform and restrain government before it could be destroyed by the pathogen that is Barack Obama and his unbearable liberalism. Didn’t happen.
the Tea Party feels like they got conned back in 2011.
I think one of the really signature qualities of the Tea Party – though it’s definitely not limited to them, nor to conservatives in general – is the complete inability to be satisfied. I’m not sure what causes that, probably that whatever they think they want isn’t really what they want. As to what that is, I can only guess.
It seems the Democrats are slowly learning to deal with this kind of trolling. Obama’s done a good job in the face of a million dipshit birthers droning “This latest round of evidence raises more questions than it answers, not that we can articulate what those questions are.”
They’re not satisfied because they’re fanatics. or have “fanaticism personality disorder”