Apr 12 2011
A Rush To Gullibility
It seems Rush Limbaugh has taken the bait in a bit of liberal media spin designed to sugar coat the budget deal reached this week for the closing 6 months of GFY 11 (which ends Oct 1, 2011). Apparently the usually sharp Limbaugh fell for some misinformation meant to convince the left they weren’t really giving up much this week. Rush’s naive and fanciful view of the government belies a serious ignorance on how the government operates. The trick line appears to be:
About $10 billion of the cuts already have been enacted as the price for keeping the government open as negotiations progressed; lawmakers tipped their hand regarding another $10 billion or so when the House passed a spending bill last week that ran aground in the Senate.
So some easily verifiable lessons must be taught. Since there was no budget passed last year, the temporary budgets contained in the sea of CRs we have seen since Oct 1210 are transient and ethereal. Did anyone actually believe each CR immediately cut money from the government programs each time a CR passed?
Sorry to say, this is were naivete takes hold. Just like the Democrats actually had to wait 12-24 months for the stimulus bill’s money to actually begin being spent due to an avalanche of sluggish federal processes, the time it takes to stop and shutdown programs is no less time consuming.
None of those previous cuts in previous CRs survived the sunset date on the CR. All previous CRs were null and void last Friday. This is a well known fact inside The Beltway, something the armchair experts outside don’t get. Therefore you HAVE TO restate the previous cuts, which will take months to enact, in the last 2011 CR coming out this week for them to be ‘permanent’ – and I mean active through Oct 1, 2010.
For cuts that were going to have out year impacts, they have to be codified in 2012 budget to remain ‘alive’. Clearly, even many of the political experts don’t understand the basic mechanics of the federal government, and do a disservice to the people they are trying to communicate with when they rush to gullibility like this.
I worked on OMB A-133 audits and the lack of understanding of government funding from right wing pundits is staggering.
If the conservative intelligentsia doesn’t understand the authorization, appropriation, actual cash outlay process, how is the average liberal/conservative american going to understand. That is why the dishonest spin the AP and WaPo put on this deal is so reprehensible.
Because the inside the Beltway poker games are so hard to understand for the casual observer, I think the debt limit vote will be the big battle this year. Much more straight forward for the average apolitical person to grasp. Although Paul Ryan’s roadshows on the GFY 2012 budgets are quite good.
Good lesson AJ. I few things I do know. The economy is growing at 1.5%, not the 4 or 5% predicted as predicted. Job growth is happening but not in big enough numbers. What Obama says and what he does are not usually the same and it takes a “freedom of information” request to find out what he has really done, and what he has spent money on. We pick up really bad guys and can’t interrogate them and can’t hold them because he won’t use Gitmo. So we have no information on what al Queda is up to, where they are going, like South America, or what they are planning. The guy is a con man and one would have to follow him around 24/7 to know that what he says and what he does seldomly match.
I see the recent budget fight as just a setup for the Debt Ceiling fight. This was a skirmish, that’s the real deal.
Now if Boehner lets the debt ceiling go up without some massive changes and concessions, then I would definitely lose faith in him. But I don’t think he will.
I also think they are going to have to miss the deadline and force the government to scramble for a month or two before the demands to cut get taken seriously. The government can hold out till at least July by transferring money around; push it as hard as possible.
And on the cynical side – the dems will claim that it is hurting the economy. I don’t believe that, but if the Dems do, they also believe that a bad economy hurts Obama’s chances more than anyone’s. So it ups the pressure on them to concede.
Krauthammer had a good point on the debt ceiling topic; his view (which I agree with) is that we need to at temporarily refuse to raise the debt celing to give *everyone* on all sides a taste of what’s going to happen if the US is forced to default on its debts in a few years.
And make no mistake, if we keep running up debt at the rate of $1.5 Trillion per year, we are headed to an eventual default – no other possible resolution.
The disappointing part about the recent budget cutting fight was that, in the end, it was about whether we should run a $1.54 trillion deficit this year or just a $1.5 trillion one.
Boehner’s acheivement, sad to say, is just a rounding error. Inconsequential – of course, even $100 billion cut would be inconsequential in the big picture.
That’s how screwed we are right now.
Well Ace of Spades was gungho for Boener’s deal. Not anymore: http://minx.cc/?post=314667, “Suckers: We Were Fooled; Budget Barely Cuts Anything”.
CBO: Small 2011 payoff from big cuts
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/53098.html
I don’t want to stay focused on the 2011 fight this late in the fiscal year. We need to get what we can and then move on to the real fight where the real cuts, the real debate, and the real adult conversation for a permanent change in direction begins.
The longer we stay focused on the 2011 budget, the more exhausted and tired we become of a budget that will soon look like the “past” instead of the “future”. We need to stay focused on the “future”.
CBO: Budget deal cuts this fiscal year’s deficit by just $353 million, not $38 billion touted
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/cbo-budget-deal-cuts-this-fiscal-years-deficit-by-just-353-million-not-38-billion-touted/2011/04/13/AFFJnkWD_story.html
At this point, no amount of spending cuts with Obama and the Dems in the Senate will make absolutely NO difference.
I am with Frogg1 but more than that….just get FY2011 passed without having to worry about another CR. This gives the Republicans more time to fight for the debt ceiling limit, then FY2012.
Someone came to me about Charles Bolden’s decision on where to host the retiring space shuttles, I indicated that Houston is very unhappy about it. I said that I was unhappy back in 2007 and 2008…so unhappy that I’m no longer surprised and just waiting until next year’s elections with the intent of voting Obama out of the White House and increasing the majorities in both houses.
I see that very many conservatives are very unhappy with last week’s performance of the House GOP. They need to understand how politics work with this kind of demographics of all three houses.
The fact that Charles Bolden and Obama chose to reject Houston as one of the three locations to host a shuttle is indicative that they want to shut down JSC within a few short years.
putting a shuttle in LA was a travesty. It was revenge on the part of the California dems.
Maybe when California goes bankrupt Texas can buy it from them. For a couple tankers of gasoline.
[…] commentators into the ignorant class and those savvy and honest about cutting the federal budget. As I noted the other day, poor Rush Limbaugh got completely hoodwinked by a piece of liberal media disinformation, and went […]