As things now stand, the budget deficit will be $1.500 trillion for this fiscal year. If the GOP has their way, it will be $1.477 trillion. That's a cut of merely 1.5% . Despite everything the GOP is going after, our budget deficit will be 98.5% of what it would have been otherwise -- virtually unchanged. In other words, the only thing they didn't slash was the budget deficit.
What this exercise proves is that the Republican approach doesn't represent a serious effort at deficit reduction. Instead, it's an exercise in targeting programs that help the kinds of people Republicans don't like. They really don't care about deficit reduction: the GOP's precious tax cuts for the wealthy added nearly twice as much to the deficit as the total amount of cuts in this proposal.
