Laughable Senate Cuts
by William Lauderback
 On Oct. 25th, the Senate Finance Committee released reconciliation
recommendations to cut spending. If it were not such a sad commentary on
the Senate Republican leadership’s inability to come to terms with
out-of-control spending, it would be laughable.
The Committee’s proposed FY 2006 reduction in spending totals only $819
million. The CBO baseline estimate for total FY 2006 federal spending
(before Katrina) is $2.595 trillion. Therefore, the Senate Finance
Committee is recommending a reduction of only 0.032%. And the Senate
intends to sell this to the American people as constituting fiscal
discipline?
What about the “out years”? Over the FY 2006-2010 period, the Committee’s
proposal reduces spending by $10 billion. The CBO baseline estimate for
total federal spending for the period FY 2006-FY 2010 is $14.31 trillion.
Translation: The fiscal disciplinarians in the Senate are proposing to
reduce spending by 0.07% over five years.
The Committee proposal claims that the really big savings ($54.8 billion)
come during the ten-year period FY 2006-FY2015. The CBO baseline estimate
for total federal spending for the FY 2006-FY 2015 period is $32.18
trillion. The result being that the Senate Committee is proposing to reduce
spending over the next ten years by…..drum roll…0.17%.
The best they can do is get to 0.17% over ten years? By comparison, just a
1 percent reduction of ten years would be $328 billion. What the Senate
Committee is proposing is just one-sixth of that.
Here’s a question: What is 0.032% of $1,000? Answer: 32-cents. The best
the Senate can do is cut 32-cents out of every $1,000 in federal spending in
FY 2006? The only place you can buy a cup of coffee for 32-cents is...
heck, there’s not any such place!
And one last comment: The CBO estimates that American taxpayers will pay
over $3 trillion in interest on the federal debt over the next ten years,
while the total debt increases by another $2.1 trillion.
J. WilliamLauderback, Executive Vice President, The American Conservative
Union. The source of my CBO spending data is
http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?index=1944&sequence=0
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