July 22, 2019
Hey, but why would anyone expect otherwise from the Washington Post. The piece gave the outlines of a budget deal between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the White House, which is intended to avoid hitting the debt ceiling.
According to the article:
“Agreeing on new spending levels also avoids onerous budget caps that would otherwise snap into place automatically under an Obama-era deal, and indiscriminately slash $126 billion from domestic and Pentagon budgets.”
Is this $126 billion over one year or two years? That is not entirely clear from the piece, but it looks like a two-year figure. So how big a deal would this be? My guess is almost none of the Post’s readers has any idea how much money the government is projected to spend in the effect categories (discretionary domestic and defense spending) over the next two fiscal years.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, if spending in these categories increased with inflation, it would come to a bit more than $2.7 trillion over the next two years. This means the cuts would have been a bit more than 4.5 percent of spending.
It would be helpful if the Post’s budget articles put numbers in a context that is meaningful to their readers.
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