If a democrat’s lips are moving they are lying...start with that principle and you will never go wrong.
My guess is they intend to use the long term debt increase, through the 2012 fiscal year as a form of budget i.e. if the debt can be increased by this amount, that is what the budget should accomodate.
Weed, er Reid, is nothing but a lying piece of crap and his immediate underling, Skeemer er Shumer, is identical and equally smelly.
Note the reference to the ‘baseline’...this refers to the ‘baseline budgeting’ scam run by the federal government and is the primary source of the upward curve of federal spending. The few ‘cuts’ we ever get are nothing more than reductions in the future growth of spending. Imagine your personal budget is 50,000 for the current year. Under federal budgeting your projected budget for the same services next year would be 53,500 (an assumed 7% annual growth). Run this run this out over the same ten year period the CBO uses and you wind up automatically spending about 92,000 in the final year for the same services and products you buy now. Of course Congress will add additional increases to account for inflation and flavor of the month projects to their already assumed baselne. This also enables the Left to demonize those who propose spending cuts even though such cuts are always cuts in growth of spending; never actual cuts from a previous year. Unless the electorate soon stops this crooked game that is at the foundation of our spending problems the whole thing will collapse under its own weight.