Is the debt ceiling deal supposed to be some sort of a cruel joke? Is this what the American people have been waiting months and months for? The "debt ceiling deal from hell" is a complete and total fraud. Barack Obama will not need to worry about the debt ceiling again until after the 2012 election, and no "real" spending cuts will happen until after the 2012 election. The way the political game in Washington D.C. is played today, if you don't get something right now, you probably will never end up getting it. The Republicans have traded a massive debt ceiling increase right now for the possibility of very skimpy budget cuts in the future. Meanwhile, this deal establishes a new "Super Congress" that threatens to fundamentally alter our political system (and not in a good way). The funny thing is that everyone is running around proclaiming that the Tea Party won this battle. That is a complete and total lie.
So what about the $917 billion in "immediate" spending cuts that the Republicans are getting as part of this deal?
Well, they aren't really spending cuts at all. Rather, they are spending caps. Basically what is happening is that future spending increases are being cancelled and our politicians are selling that to us as "spending cuts".
What is even sadder is that the $917 billion is spread over ten years and the vast majority of the "cuts" are in the latter years.
For example, even if you consider these to be "spending cuts" (which they are not), the deal calls for only about $25 billion in "cuts" in 2012 and only about $47 billion in "cuts" in 2013.
25 billion dollars is far less than one percent of the federal budget, so needless to say these "cuts" are not very impressive at all.
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