Federal budgeting is nutty because the federal budget assumes every item in the budget automatically rises annually regardless of economic conditions by somewhere between 3% and 10%. Based on this insanity if we simply freeze spending at the current level and do it for a decade, the Congressional Budget Office would consider that a $9.5 trillion CUT! At 2% growth the CBO would score a $4 trillion cut.
Remember the $39 billion spending cut pushed by Republicans in April that averted a gov’t shutdown? It was all smoke and mirrors! Instead of cutting outlays the CBO now figures it will actually increase spending by $3.2 billion. The cuts were mostly phony like cancelling budget authorization for programs that weren’t actually going to get funded anyways. This shows that really solving our budget problems will be very hard.