…or why the US cuts are actually faster than, and just as deep as, ours.
Dear Will,
We hope you don’t mind us writing a letter-form response to your latest post on Left Foot Forward, which argues that the “coalition government’s cuts are deeper and faster than the Tea Party’s”. But, as we see it, there are several problems with your figures which are easier to explain in a conversational format. Here they are, as best as we can express them:
i) The first obvious problem comes when you say that Obama set out $83 billion of deficit reduction for 2012 in his March Budget. Actually, he didn’t. The Congressional Budget Office figures that you refer to compare his budgetary plans to their own March 2011 baseline — and they discover that the deficit would have been $83 billion *higher* under Obama’s plans in 2012; $209 billion *higher* in 2013; and so on.
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