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But you don’t deal in reality, you deal in perception.

In reality, your taxes were cut, because if they had not voted for this bill, your taxes would be higher than they are now.

However, you PERCEIVE that your taxes are not cut, because last week you paid a certain amount in taxes, and since they passed this bill, your taxes next week will be the same as they were last week.

It’s like if you lived downstream from a dam, and the dam had a crack. Fortunately, someone notices the crack, and reports it. The engineer looks at the crack, and realizes that if they hadn’t caught it, the dam would break and you would drown. But they act quickly, and drain the lake, and you don’t drown.

So, was your life saved, or not? In reality, you were as good as dead, but now you are alive, so yes, your life was saved.

But in your perception, nothing happened. The dam didn’t break, you never knew you were in danger, and now you are alive just like you were before.

Your analogy of budgets was flawed, but it is typical of how we discuss the issue, because we treat different things as the same. In your analogy, it is the difference between costs that are known to rise, and costs that we simply assume will rise.

For example, my HOA can lock in rates for the pool company, by signing a multi-year deal, which includes small increases each year. In the 3rd year this past year, we signed a new 3-year deal, and as part of that deal, we got the company to waive the increase for this year.

Therefore, we cut spending $500 relative to what the existing contract stated. And by doing so, we were able to keep our budget balanced, without raising our maintenance fees. We didn’t cut pool spending, it will be the same as it was last year. But we cut the BUDGET, because under the existing contract spending this year would have been higher than it is now.

In other words, you can truly cut a budget, without actually cutting spending. If you claim you “cut spending”, you are making a false claim. If you claim you cut the budget, that is a truthful statement, and it also means that you have decreased the need for revenue, so it is a REAL thing you have done, not just some gimick.

Of course, much of what they count as “cuts” are just gimicks, but pretending there is no such thing as a budget cut just obscures the real problem of fake cuts.

There are many reasons to expect spending to increase year-to-year. For example, medicare spending rises in part because each year, more people are 65, and therefore more people get medicare. You could “cut” the per-person spending on medicare, and make a real improvement in our federal budget, but the total spent on medicare could still increase because more people are using it.

Anyway, everything we are doing is semantics. When we passed the tax cuts in 2001, we didn’t want to apply the budget rules, so we made the tax cuts temporary. Applying the rules would have required 60 votes in the senate, and we didn’t have 60 votes. But for 10 years, nobody treated the tax cuts as temporary, except of course for the CBO, which assumed the tax cuts would expire when determining what the deficit would be in 2011.

That’s why, when we passed the bill that just cut taxes again, it increased the deficit.

See, semantics. You can claim we didn’t cut taxes because your tax this year will be the same as last year. But the projected deficit went UP when they passed the bill — which clearly indicates that total revenues under this new bill will be lower than the total expected revenues under the old bill. That’s a “tax cut” — fewer taxes expected.