I know, what you’re thinking: Delaware Liberal is linking to the Washington Times? Has the world gone mad? The Washington Times did a study of the budget under Bush and Obama and found that Obama was able to push more budget cuts through than Bush did.
President Obama notched substantial successes in spending cuts last year, winning 60 percent of his proposed cuts and managing to get Congress to ax several programs that had bedeviled President George W. Bush for years.
The administration says Congress accepted at least $6.9 billion of the $11.3 billion in discretionary spending cuts Mr. Obama proposed for the current fiscal year. An analysis by The Washington Times found that Mr. Obama was victorious in getting Congress to slash 24 programs and achieved some level of success in reducing nine other programs.
Among the president’s victories are canceling the multibillion-dollar F-22 Raptor program, ending the LORAN-C radio-based ship navigation system and culling a series of low-dollar education grants. In each of those cases, Mr. Obama succeeded in eliminating programs that Mr. Bush repeatedly failed to end.
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By comparison, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says Mr. Bush won 40 percent of his spending cuts in fiscal 2006 and won less than 15 percent of his proposed cuts for 2007 and 2008.
I think it’s a lot easier to talk about budget cuts in the abstract but when it gets down to actually cutting programs it’s much more difficult. Programs always have their proponents who will fight to save them because it brings jobs to their district. Budget cuts can have real consequences for them. Also, I doubt Obama will get any credit from the media or the born-again fiscal conservatives.
In the long run, we’re going have to figure out how to fix our budget. The deficit will be a drag on the economy in the long term.