What’s $100 billion between political enemies?
Steve Bell, Visiting Scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center:
Republicans risk over-promising and drastically under-achieving. Simple arithmetic condemns most of the $100 billion and “back to FY08″ ideas.
Without wanting to be a curmudgeon on the subject, I still fall back on simple numbers.
The United States will spend approximately $450 billion on “non-security” discretionary spending programs in the fiscal we now occupy–FY11. We are about 4 months into the fiscal year. In the 8 months remaining, then, a linear approach gives us about $300 billion remaining to be spent from already appropriated funds for these discretionary domestic programs.
Thus, the pledge to find $100 billion in cuts, or to return to FY08 levels, means a reduction of one-third of all remaining spending in the targeted programs.
To find $100 billion in outlays (after all, it is outlays compared to revenues that gives us deficits), I estimate that one would have to really cut about 50 per cent of all remaining monies. This begins to be technical, so you have to trust me here–most members of the House and Senate have no idea that outlays (spending) by agencies in any given fiscal year varies dramatically from new appropriations annually. That is a problem of immense proportions.
When I tried to explain this to my friend–a graduate of Brown University with his Ph.D. from Cambridge–he asked me to stop after about 10 minutes. It made his head hurt and it made no sense.
Bottom line–if you want to cut $100 billion from spending in FY11, you will have to start with immediate furloughs of hundreds of thousands of government workers, stop paying the government’s share of the TSP savings programs, close down most government funded operations, and stop most of the research grants the U.S. funds.
It can be done. But if it is done, President Obama and the Democratic Party will have been given one of the great electoral gifts of all time.
