August 01, 2011
Many readers of the NYT and Post may not have a good sense of how much $2.4 trillion in cuts over the next decade is. Unfortunately, the major news outlets do not consider it their responsibility to tell us.
The government is projected to spend $46 trillion over the next 10 years. This means that the proposed cuts are a bit more than 5 percent of projected spending. However, large categories of the budget are protected. More than $27 trillion of projected spending goes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and interest. If these areas escape largely untouched, the projected cuts would be around 13 percent of the remaining portion of the budget.
In fact, since some other areas of the budget, like unemployment insurance, are also likely to be largely protected, the cuts to the remaining portion of the budget will be even larger.
The government is projected to spend $7.8 trillion on the military over the next decade. If this area is largely protected, then most of the cuts would likely come from the $6.7 trillion of spending on the domestic discretionary portion of the budget. This is the portion that includes spending on infrastructure, education, research, and other areas that are considered investment.
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