Ted its not an issue of media sources, its an issue of budget facts. The source for the data you reject is mostly the CBO. I have more CBO data below.
If you go to the New York Times, or CNN, or something to their left, they will use the same flawed terminology as Obama, they will call a reduction in an increase "a cut", but whatever label the put on it spending goes up. Go to the CBO or OMB sites, or for a simplier presentation Wikipedia, look at the historical spending levels after every round of "cuts". Spending goes up. Go to whatever media sites you want, sure the one's you pick are going to talk about "harsh cuts", but then look at the actual projections for future spending, they are all up, all the spending levels wind up being higher than they are now.
The CBO isn't some "winger" site. But look at the spending projections. This is the baseline, it doesn't include any of the claimed "cuts" under the new deal, but the "cuts" aren't enough to keep the spending levels from going up.
cbo.gov
Look at the spending after the "cuts" claimed in the president's budget (apparently there are some small amount of spending they don't include since the government has been spending more than the amount in the baseline but the change in the figures is the important point, notice how both the baseline, and the Obama budget figures both go up and up and up)
CBO estimate of the president's budget - Outlays (billions)
2010 - 3456, 2011 - 3655, 2012 - 3708, 2013 - 3800, 2014 - 3976, 2015 - 4191, 2016 - 4476, 2017 - 4687, 2018 - 4896, 2019 - 5200, 2020 - 5483, 2021 - 5756.
The spending goes up every year, and also its not even a reduction in the rate of growth since every year spending is higher than the CBO's baseline. (Also if you look at the link you'll notice large deficits going on and on)
I'm not totally sure what baseline Obama claimed to be willing to cut $4tril from, but if its from his own budget projections the "$4tril cut" still leaves higher spending. $4tril over 10 years is $400bil a year. Cut $400bil, or even assume its heavily backloaded (which means its less likely to happen, and we accumilate more debt first even if it does happen, but which strengthens the claim for an actual eventual cut if you believe it will happen), and cut $800bil off the end year. $5756bil - $800bil is $4956bil. That's well above whar we are spending now.
Ted your welcome to your own (or Mother Jone's, or Daily Kos') opinion, but not to your own facts. The fact is after Obama's claimed cuts, after the claimed cuts in the recent budget deal, after Paul Ryan's earlier plan, after almost any of the plans, spending keeps going up, there are no real top line cuts, only so called cuts from an ever expanding baseline.
As I put in in an earlier post with an analogy to a family budget -
"If the US Government was a family, they would be making $58,000 a year, they spend $75,000 a year, & are $327,000 in credit card debt. They are currently proposing BIG spending cuts to reduce their spending to $72,000 a year. These are the actual proportions of the federal budget & debt, reduced to a level that we can understand." - Dave Ramsey
Not really. Its more like they are spending $75,000 a year and are proposing "BIG spending cuts" to "reduce" spending to $82,000 a year (rather than the $85,000 a year they where planning to increase spending to).
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