Call Me When You Are Serious

Derek Thompson checks out the GOP's spending cut proposal:

At nearly $2 trillion, the deficit is a monster. So the GOP has proposed $375 billion of budget cuts to pare it down. That's the good news. The bad news is that when you peak under the hood of the engine, you see two big wrenches. 1) $317 billion of the estimated cuts is just a cap on discretionary spending, which is a make-believe item that will never pass Congress. 2) The new, actionable ideas amount to only $5 billion a year, which is a hardy 0.3% of the estimated deficit.

As the Cato Institute blog points out, if you're aiming to amputate billions of dollars off the budget, why keep defense spending off the operating table

Derek also writes about some of the non-crazy ideas in the proposal.

2006-2011 archives for The Daily Dish, featuring Andrew Sullivan