The Political Spectrum

The Washington Post reports that the administration has proposed a budget that cuts non-military discretionary spending by 1%. That's not a cut in the Washington sense of the term, meaning a decrease in the amount of proposed increase. No, these would be real cuts into various programs. It's almost as if the members of the administration woke up one day and remembered that they were Republicans.

Unfortunately Congress is Congress, and though ostensibly controlled by the conservatives, no program is too meaningless or unproductive to not have at least one member willing to go to the mattresses in order to protect it. Thus it is unlikely that many of the proposed cuts will in fact be enacted. But not worry, says Republican Whip Roy Blunt of Missouri.

House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said in an interview that although many of the requests will be opposed, he believes that Congress will still cut "tens of millions of dollars and set the standard that the federal government can stop doing things that it shouldn't be doing, or is not doing well."

Wow! Tens of millions of dollars! That is so amazingly impressive and goes to show that the budget hawks are in control. Let's ignore the fact that it's even less than a drop in the bucket of what the feds spend every year - I think it just spent that much in the time it took me to write this sentence. Oh no, we're on the way to real fiscal austerity now.

To be fair, even the Bush proposals hardly make that much of a dent in the deficit, and the budget does not include several very expensive items.

The spending plan does not include future expenses of the continuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, nor does it include upfront transition costs of restructuring Social Security as Bush has proposed. The administration will submit a separate supplemental request largely for Afghanistan and Iraq operations in the current fiscal year, which will be reflected in the budget charts, officials said, but war costs in 2006 and beyond will not be. Nor will be the cost of Bush's Social Security plan, which would begin in 2009 and result in $754 billion in additional debt over its first five years.

Those omissions provide ammunition to Democrats who dispute Bush's math. "The Administration's claim that it will cut the deficit in half by 2009 lacks credibility," said a report released last week by House Budget Committee Democrats. When the omitted items are included, along with the impact of making Bush's first-term tax cuts permanent, the report estimated that the government would rack up $6.1 trillion in deficit spending over the next decade.

Of course Congressional Democrats mocking the administration over spending is a bit like Peyton Manning criticizing Donavan McNabb's play against the Patriots. Still, this news hardly signals that it is time for fiscal conservatives to start popping the champagne. We're on the right track, but we've got a lot farther to go if we want to get serious about slashing the budget and reducing the grip of the federal leviathan.