Obama’s Budget Cuts

Lori Montgomery and Amy Goldstein in the Washington Post open with a hard-hitting lede about Barack Obama’s proposed budget cuts:

President Obama has said for weeks that his staff is scouring the federal budget, “line by line,” for savings. Today, they will release the results: a plan to trim 121 programs by $17 billion, a tiny fraction of next year’s $3.4 trillion budget.

The plan is less ambitious than the hit list former president George W. Bush produced last year, targeting 151 programs for $34 billion in savings. And like most of the cuts Bush sought, congressional sources and independent budget analysts yesterday predicted that Obama’s, too, would be a tough sell.

I think it’s fair to hit the administration for their rhetoric about going “line by line” through the budget as being a bit flim-flammy. That said, the underlying presumption here that the correct way to measure the quality of a proposed set of budget cuts is purely by assessing its scale is dead wrong. That way of thinking leads you down the path of true junk proposals like an across the board “spending freeze.” Obama’s point on this, throughout the campaign, has been not that the government ought to spend less money but that it ought to spend less money on programs that are ineffective. After all, if a program is providing valuable services why should it be cut? Conversely, if the program’s not providing valuable services, then why should it be funded? Obviously, there’s scope around the margin for people to disagree about how valuable different programs are. But the presumption underlying the philosophy of across the board cuts is that all federal domestic discretionary are ineffective, and that they’re all equally ineffective.