Posted on 04/12/2011 8:04:55 AM PDT by quesney
WASHINGTON – The historic $38 billion in budget cuts resulting from at-times hostile bargaining between Congress and the Obama White House were accomplished in large part by pruning money left over from previous years, using accounting sleight of hand and going after programs President Barack Obama had targeted anyway.
Such moves permitted Obama to save favorite programs — Pell grants for poor college students, health research and "Race to the Top" aid for public schools, among others — from Republican knives, according to new details of the legislation released Tuesday morning.
And big holes in foreign aid and Environmental Protection Agency accounts were patched in large part. Republicans also gave up politically treacherous cuts to the Agriculture Department's food inspection program.
The details of the agreement reached late Friday night just ahead of a deadline for a partial government shutdown reveal a lot of one-time savings and cuts that officially "score" as cuts to pay for spending elsewhere, but often have little to no actual impact on the deficit.
As a result of the legerdemain, Obama was able to reverse many of the cuts passed by House Republicans in February when the chamber approved a bill slashing this year's budget by more than $60 billion.
[...]
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Played or not played. If demoncrats and the “liberal agenda” want to step all over cuts no matter how small, step all over the constitution well, there WILL be a battle in the end, a mighty bloody one most probably.
The best of economic experts as( I am not one just was told this by a pretty good one that had a “round table down you at or around UCI)I’ve been told, America if it continues DOWN this spiraling path, Obamacom and his com-cronies will have enslaved America to communist interests, defaulted on all loans and ruined the whole infrastructure of America; thus one of two things may happen, a brutal war like in umm Libya, or Greece, or past days of Argentina, or America wakes up which the latter shows not likely soon enough.
Now I’m just the messenger, two years from now give or take( this was 1.5 years ago) they said,”... four years on the outside bubble.” Whatever that means. If totus wins a second election, if we make it to that date, well, they didn’t elaborate how it’ll happen; I wouldn’t understand all of it anyway, but it sounded to me like a catastrophe to the nth degree. Not many country’s in the world would come to our aide, umm maybe none.
The administration also thwarted a GOP attempt to block new rules governing the Internet, as well as a National Rifle Association-backed attempt to neuter a little-noticed initiative aimed at catching people running guns to Mexican drug lords by having regulators gather information on batch purchases of rifles and shotguns.Let's see if Boehner can get a majority of his caucus to vote for this nonsense and all the other smoke and mirrors.
We want him to talk about how he will reduce spending. He wants to talk about raising revenues. What an idiot!
Only libs (and, apparently now, Rinos) call a reduction in the rate of increase a cut.
This is part of the nonsense that the Tea Party seeks to eliminate.
Rand Paul says we are spending more in 2011 than we did in 2010. Tell me again how freaking genius the GOP leadership was for getting us these great “cuts”?
The troops paychecks were hostage to all of this.
Interesting that you bring that up during the sequicentenial. By Jeffersonian thinking we are 130 years over due.
Thanks sickoflibs.
http://law.jrank.org/pages/7522/Impoundment.html
[snip] ...The current rules and procedures for impoundment were created by the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 (2 U.S.C.A. § 601 et seq.), which was passed to reform the congressional budget process and to resolve conflicts between Congress and President RICHARD M. NIXON concerning the power of the EXECUTIVE BRANCH to impound funds appropriated by Congress. Past presidents, beginning with THOMAS JEFFERSON, had impounded funds at various times for various reasons, without instigating any significant conflict between the executive and the legislative branches. At times, such as when the original purpose for the money no longer existed or when money could be saved through more efficient operations, Congress simply acquiesced to the president’s wishes. At other times, Congress or the designated recipient of the impounded funds challenged the president’s action, and the parties negotiated until a political settlement was reached. [pnis]
http://supreme.justia.com/constitution/article-2/37-impoundment-of-appropriated-funds.html
[snip] Impoundment of Appropriated Funds — In his Third Annual Message to Congress, President Jefferson established the first faint outline of what years later became a major controversy. Reporting that $50,000 in funds which Congress had appropriated for fifteen gunboats on the Mississippi remained unexpended, the President stated that a “favorable and peaceful turn of affairs on the Mississippi rendered an immediate execution of the law unnecessary... .†But he was not refusing to expend the money, only delaying action to obtain improved gunboats; a year later, he told Congress that the money was being spent and gun-boats were being obtained.628 A few other instances of deferrals or refusals to spend occurred in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, but it was only with the Administration of President Franklin Roosevelt that a President refused to spend moneys for the purposes appropriated. Succeeding Presidents expanded upon these precedents, and in the Nixon Administration a well-formulated plan of impoundments was executed in order to reduce public spending and to negate programs established by congressional legislation. [pnis]
"Just one more bottle" said the alcoholic.
Did you mean to say "2010" where you said "2012"?
Yes, sorry.... Correction: The $38b is a real ‘cut’ from 2010. (We now know that $38b had some smoke-n-mirrors ‘cuts’ that were already goign to be taken or unspent anyway, but the key point is that it was/is $38b off the 2010 budget amount, not merely ‘slowing the growth’.)
If they were really serious about the deficit, they would cut to under $500 billion in the upcoming year.
The closest is the RSC budget but even that one is at $800b.
And look at how LITTLE the Ryan plan does relative to the baseline, $100b less but still at $900b. Not enough!
They need to take the RSC 2013 number and bring it in to FY2012.
The RSC has the best budget plan out there, so there is no reason to bash them.
Frankly, keeping the debt increase to ‘only’ $3.5 trillion more is a great achievement. Obama would leave us at $22+ trillion in debt by the end of his term.
We are like a heroin addict, and cold turkey is impossible for our economy and simply not politically possible. The BEST we could hope to do is a plan like RSC and even that requires a conservative in the White House.
RAT bastard demoRATs & cowardly Rino repukes are bankrupting & destroying our country. Looks like Boehner & the Repub elitists are content to cave into the marxist-socialist-commie-pig-in-chief 0dumbo. I guess tomorrow I will place another scathing angry call into Boehner’s Washington DC office. Too bad the message never gets through Boehner’s staff or his thick Rino/Cino head.
So you would rather 0bama raise our National Debt by another $11 trillion?
No, it wasn't a "real" cut. It's a fraud.
The 2010 Budget Expenditure is estimated at $3.552 Trillion dollars.
The 2011 Budget deal is estimated at $3.69 Trillion or $3.773 Trillion depending on whose source you use.
Either way, we're spending more under the deal brokered by our brave Boehner, than we did the last year.
Only a fool would say that's a "cut."
Sources: 2010 Fiscal Budget Wikipedia; http://goo.gl/6GzV
2011 Budget: The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/01/us/budget.html
You are right on the big numbers, but there still are some real ‘cuts’ in that specific programs were cut or eliminated vs what was spent in 2010. Here is HotAir’s take:
http://hotair.com/archives/2011/04/12/two-obamacare-programs-four-czars-eliminated-in-budget-cuts/
About $16b in real cuts and $22b in smoke and mirrors reductions. I made this comment on them:
Small potatoes indeed. We have a $3.8 trillion budget, bloated with hundreds of billions in wasteful add-ons put in by Pelosi and Reid and Obama, ready to explode further when Obamacare adds more hundreds of billions in full swing, and we could only get about $16 billion of it taken out?
This is like removing one gin-soaked olive from one martini for an alcoholic who is on a dozen-martinis-a-night bender.
It's simple really. There is no more money to borrow so stop spending money we don't have. Families across the country do it all the time, why can't the gubment.
Your other choice is bankruptcy.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.