Apocalypse: Deal Only Cuts $352 Million In Actual Spending

As I noted: The Democrats offered Boehner a crooked "deal" wherein they'd offer some smoke and mirrors only-in-accounting-world "cuts" and all Boehner had to do was say yes and the Democrats would play along and pretend they'd been beaten.

First Boehner announced he would not go along with such a deceit.

And then he did, with the Democrats and their allies in the media playing "the Republicans won" narrative, per the agreement, until the Democrats could contain their quiet victory no longer and began announcing it.

So there you go. We started this process, we thought, with $101 billion in cuts, which we only found out after the election was a promise to cut $61 billion.

Then Hal Rodgers -- who must resign -- had an opening bid of around $30 billion, which the Tea Party got angry about and forced him to push a supposed $61 billion cut, but the hand was tipped, it was clear we were not only not holding out for $61 billion, but if we had our druthers, we wouldn't even start there, nevermind end there.

Then some Tea Party people and the Republican Study Group pushed to get it back up to $100 billion, but leadership, including Eric Cantor, voted that down, and some in our very own party used Democratic language in defending their precious spending, saying the cutters wanted to take a "meat axe" to the budget and hurt people who depend on government.

Then we started cutting every week, which turns out now to have been a scam, because we weren't cutting spending, we were cutting future spending authority which wasn't likely to be spent anyway. In essence, when I thought we were making progress, we were actually just giving the Democrats their way by funding government at the same level as usual.

Then we finally agreed on $38.5 billion. Later inspection checked more closely, and determined that most of that wasn't really cuts at all, but accounting gimmicks, fake cuts, and that the real amount of cuts was around $14 billion.

Then someone noticed -- actually, it's closer to $8 billion.

And now the CBO looks at it.

$352 million, with an m, in cuts. What the government spends in... oh, it's like $6 billion a day, so $352 million is what the government spends in about an hour and twenty minutes.

That's what we fought for in November--so that we could cut the 365 days of spending of 2010 into 354 days, twenty two hours, and forty minutes worth of spending.

Hal Rodgers has to go. Has to go. The party has to demand he resign from his post. There have to be consequences.

Someone has to pay.

The rest have to know they're next. We can't hang them all, but we can hang one of them. To encourage the others.

Biggest spending cut in history, huh?

GOP Leadership Lobbying for Votes: At Hot Air.

F*** it all. Shut it down. Burn it down. The hell with it all.

2012? Who cares?

posted by Ace at 06:46 PM

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