From the FINANCIAL TIMES:
The story is that this week, Washington came together for a bipartisan festival of spending cuts, slicing a mighty $917bn off outlays during the next decade with much more to come. Republicans took a triumphant step towards limiting the size of government; Barack Obama, president, showed he was a responsible dealmaker and a man to be trusted with the economy after a 2012 re-election.
That is the story. But the closer one looks at the debt-limit deal, the more slippery those spending cuts become. The reality is that few cuts have actually been made yet – and many of those promised are unlikely to ever materialise.
It is the very nature of the deal that even the firm $917bn involves no direct cuts. The deal does not say that education spending is to be frozen or name an agency to have its budget slashed. Instead, it sets caps on how much the federal government can spend in each of the next 10 years and writes them into law…
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