Ryan: My Budget Didn't Count Money Not Spent on Unfought Wars As Savings At All

Gee, what a shock. Democrats put out a spin-line, media regurgitates before checking or getting a comment.

The $2.7 trillion debt-limit increase proposal offered by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid contains a $1 trillion gimmick meant to disguise the plan’s shallowness on spending cuts. Supporters of the Reid plan are measuring their savings against a baseline that assumes the continuation of surge-level spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though the President has neither requested this funding nor signaled that he might request it. Instead, the President has signaled the opposite: a troop drawdown over the next few years. In other words, the Reid plan is claiming credit for “savings” that were already scheduled to occur, and for “cutting” spending that no one has requested.

Rather than defend this gimmick on the merits, supporters of the Reid plan are defending it by claiming that House Republicans “also included” this $1 trillion in savings when calculating spending reductions in the budget resolution that passed the House last April. This claim is false. The House-passed budget cuts $6.2 trillion in spending relative to President Obama’s FY2012 budget request, and this spending reduction assumes ZERO savings from the global war on terror relative to the President’s budget.

In the interest of maximum transparency, House Republicans produced additional estimates in order to provide a broad range of comparisons by which outsiders could judge the seriousness of the their budget’s commitment to real spending cuts and controls.

I wound up getting it right without checking myself. (Not that not-checking is a good thing or anything.)

Charts are included in his budget noting projected spending. Since he does not project fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan forever, there is little spending for those wars included in those charts.

Obviously. If you're not spending money for X it doesn't show up in your charts.

But he didn't include the "savings" of not fighting wars in his budget proposal.

So, shock, the Democrats lied, and the media trumpeted their lies around the world, before the truth had time to get its shoes on.

posted by Ace at 07:15 PM

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