More on the Budget Deal

I thought I heard $78 billion less on the news last night, but I couldn't find it on line at the time:

President Obama’s 2011 budget called for a spending increase of $40 billion. Tonight, he touted a bipartisan agreement on “the largest annual spending cut in our history” — some $38.5 billion [emphasis added]. All told, he got $78.5 billion less than he originally requested.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) didn’t want to cut anything at first. But bowing to political reality, eventually ponied up about $4.7 billion in cuts. He ended up with $33.8 billion less spending than he wanted. And he called it an “historic” accomplishment. (Not surprisingly, the left is appalled).

House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio), on the other hand, initially proposed $32 billion in spending cuts. House Republicans, led by an undaunted freshman class, bumped that number up to $61 billion ($100 billion off the president’s budget), before settling on $38.5 billion. That’s $6.5 billion more than Boehner asked for to begin with, and $5.5 billion more than the $33 billion that Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Democrats claimed had been agreed to less than two weeks ago. It remains to be seen how much of that will be cuts to discretionary spending, but all told it would appear that we’'ll see a substantial reduction in baseline spending that will yield hundreds of billions in savings over the next decade...

So, given the starting points, this seems like a pretty big win for the Republicans. It is not, however, a huge win for fiscal sanity.  The budget is about $3.7 trillion (for our UK readers, in the US a billion is 10 to the ninth power, while a trillion is 10 to the twelfth power). The $38 billion figure for the cut is thus about 1% of the total annual budget, and only about 2% from Obama's starting point.  The expected deficit this year is roughly $1.4 trillion, so the $38 trillion savings represents about a week and a half's worth of the deficit.

As they say, the longest journey begins with a single step, but I can't help but wish they had taken a bigger step.

A little graphic courtesy of Patterico to remind ourselves where we are at...