The federal budget is a massive undertaking, and if you go through it you will find projects that were completed using less money than was allocated, projects that were cancelled, projects that were created by typos and that never really existed. Another way of looking at this is that the government isn’t going to spend all the money that it says it is going to spend. The budget deficit isn’t as big as the government says it is. Obviously, some projects run over budget, but the cost of those projects isn’t on the books until additional money is appropriated for them.
Back in 2011, a lot of the spending cuts that were announced were not really cuts in money that was going to be spent but the identification of money that was not going to be spent. Most of this was honest accounting. Money had been appropriated, adding to the deficit on paper but not in fact. There were some gimmicks, too. It made no sense to pretend that we were going to carry out the U.S. Census in 2011 until Congress intervened. We do the Census every ten years, and having done it in 2010, there were no savings from not doing it again the next year. Census spending went down, but not because of any deal made between the president and Congress. Still, if the game is to live within our means, discovering that we owe less money is just as good as spending less money. Put it this way. Would you rather spend $1,000 less on yourself or get a letter in the mail from VISA telling you that due to an computer glitch it turns out that you owe them $1,000 less than you thought you owed them? Regardless of your answer, you are $1,000 less in debt.
Nevertheless, the Tea Party feels like they got conned back in 2011. They feel like the administration and their own leadership conspired to pull the wool over their eyes. And so, now, they like the idea of the Sequester because it represents real cuts, not accounting tricks. This is in part because they actually did get schooled in 2011, but mostly because their goal is not economic health but ideological triumph. They want to shrink the government down to the point that it is small enough to drown in a bathtub. That’s what they want. Everyone else just wants a good economy and a healthy jobs market.
The administration says that they identified all the “low-hanging fruit” in the budget back in 2011 and that they won’t be able to cut funding as painlessly this time around. Unfortunately, the Tea Party folks are stupid and they don’t learn the correct lessons. They didn’t learn that we were less broke than they thought. They learned that the administration and their own leadership would deceive them about the nature of the cuts if they tried to negotiate line-by-line through the budget. They are so dumb that they prefer dumb cuts like the across-the-board cuts in the Sequester because they can trust and understand them.
So, now, everything is more difficult.