Byron York‘s latest Washington Examiner article details congressional conservatives’ skepticism about budget deals promising trillions of dollars in cuts.
Boehner has spoken repeatedly about “trillions, not billions” in federal spending cuts. There has been talk of $2 trillion, $3 trillion, maybe even more in cuts. But conservative lawmakers ask: Will the cuts be real?
In their Pledge to America, Republican lawmakers promised to cut $100 billion in spending in their first year in control of the House. Once in office, that proved to be exceedingly difficult. First the GOP prorated the $100 billion down to $60 billion, saying there wasn’t enough time left in the fiscal year to cut the whole amount in fiscal 2011. Then $60 billion became $32 billion, and some critics said even that relatively small figure wasn’t real.
So now both Republicans and Democrats are casually talking about cutting trillions of dollars? A cut of even $1 trillion over 10 years would require cutting $100 billion each year for the next decade, which the Republicans’ experience earlier this year suggests might be a stretch. And that’s before anyone starts talking about $2 trillion or $3 trillion.
“The devil is in the details,” says a Republican strategist closely involved in the debt fight. “When you’re talking about $1 trillion, you’re talking about $100 billion a year, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be evenly distributed among the years.” Does that mean it might be loaded mostly at the end of the decade, when it might not even happen? “That’s where you get into the details,” the strategist says.
Talk like that is not going to inspire much faith among skeptical conservatives, many of whom prefer the Cut, Cap and Balance approach that would require immediate cuts, a limit on government spending as a percentage of gross domestic product, and the passage of a balanced budget amendment.
