With minutes left on the clock, Congress and President Obama compromised to pass a budget with $37 billion of spending cuts. That's pretty close to an even compromise between the $6 billion in cuts proposed by Obama and the $61 billion initially sought by the G.O.P.
Naturally, both sides praised themselves - "historic" said Senator Harry Reid and Representative John Boehner. The latter claims this will "save $500 billion over ten years". Really? As far as I know, it's a slightly-less-than-six-month budget, and this acrimonious process will start all over again in September. I'm pretty sure the 800,000 Federal workers who would've started unpaid vacation on Monday had this not passed won't be calling themselves "historic" for showing up to work and doing what they're paid to do. Memo to Barack, John, and Harry: we're not as impressed with you as you are.
After this bruiser, could both sides agree to a valuable reform? Let's move to two-year budgets. Each Congress will get to pass one, rather than spending half of every year haggling over increasingly irrelevant spending levels.
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Update: Politico says it's actually $38.5 billion. That's only a small-potatoes difference if you're so immersed in the big-government mindset that you think $1,500,000,000.00 isn't much money.
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