Myth of spending cuts

News reports about the president’s budget overflow with dismay over “deep cuts” and “slashed” spending.

Images of schools and anti-poverty programs chafing under the fiscal knife abound. This proves hardly anybody actually reads the federal budget. If they did, they would realize just how much of a myth is this tale of “slashed” spending.

Alleged “deep cuts” over the last few years to education, anti-poverty and discretionary spending can be disproven easily by examining the federal government’s budget historical tables (www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2007/hist.html, particularly tables 3.2 and 8.1). The gulf between the facts and what’s widely reported and blogged is astounding.

Myth 1: Massive education cuts. From 2001 through 2006, nominal education spending will more than double — from $35 billion to $84 billion. That is not a misprint.

K-12 education spending increased from $23 billion to $40 billion, and college student financial aid skyrocketed from $10 billion to $40 billion. The remaining money was spent on research and general education aids.

Yet when the president’s budget called for shaving $2 billion off the large discretionary education programs, Sen. Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania Republican, called the request “scandalous,” and various news articles questioned if schools could carry out their missions without another funding increase. Apparently a 137 percent budget increase isn’t enough.

Myth 2: Anti-poverty spending cuts. From 2001 through 2005, nominal antipoverty spending rose 39 percent, and is set to increase another 5 percent in 2006. In those four years, Medicaid caseloads increased by 10 million and Food Stamps caseloads by 8 million as their budgets expanded 40 percent and 71 percent, respectively. Combined payments from the refundable Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) surged from $27 billion to $48 billion.

All four categories of anti-poverty spending — health care, food, housing and cash aid — grew by more than double the inflation rate, and significantly faster than under Bill Clinton.

Overall, anti-poverty spending reached 16 percent of the federal budget for the first time ever in 2002 and has remained above that since. The new budget reconciliation law won’t change that; the only significant antipoverty program reform merely lowered Medicaid’s projected five-year growth rate from 41 percent to 40 percent.

Still, a recent New Republic staff editorial, bizarrely and without supporting data, asserted recent budgets “single out the poor for punishment” and therefore “the poor consistently lose out.” This increase in government dependency among Food Stamps and Medicaid is nothing to celebrate, and it cannot be addressed by those denying what the numbers clearly show.

Myth 3: Slashed nonsecurity discretionary spending. Reports panicking about a proposed freeze in 2007 fail to provide any context. Even after a 2007 freeze, these programs will have risen 42 percent in Mr. Bush’s first six years in the White House, versus 20 percent in Mr. Clinton’s first six years. There could be several reasons this is not reported and blogged.

One is that education and discretionary budget analyses misleadingly focus on single-year trends without providing the proper context of their large growth since 2001.

Another reason is that antipoverty spending increases are not typically covered by reporters and bloggers. That could be because these entitlement programs’ budgets grow automatically without any congressional votes.

For years, Medicaid’s large, automatic increases were largely ignored by the press. Yet when Congress recently enacted legislation to scale future automatic increases from 7.1 percent down to 7 percent annually, this “cut” got disproportionate media scrutiny because it required a separate vote.

Plus, coverage of most spending issues is also influenced by media-savvy activists, who blast any spending level as insufficient in hopes of securing additional increases.

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