Careful Budgetary Analysis Reveals the Iraq War and Bush's Tax Cuts

Jacob Sullum | February 25, 2009

In last night's speech, President Obama claimed "we have already identified two trillion dollars in savings over the next decade." This morning Nick Gillespie estimated "that comes to a whopping 5 percent or so of baseline projected spending." The figure is even less impressive when you consider its basis: Although Obama said the savings come from "eliminat[ing] wasteful and ineffective programs," The New York Times reports that "an administration official said those savings reflected reduced spending on the war in Iraq and higher revenues from letting the Bush administration's tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans lapse after 2010."

To my mind, counting the war in Iraq as a "wasteful and ineffective" program is fair enough (although keep in mind that Obama is ramping up the war in Afghanistan while he's ramping down the war in Iraq). But whatever you think about the wisdom of Bush's tax cuts, it takes a very statist frame of mind to view letting people keep more of their own money as a government program, let alone a wasteful and ineffective one. Furthermore, both sources of savings were elements of Obama's election campaign, not the results of a process he describes as "go[ing] line by line through the federal budget in order to eliminate wasteful and ineffective programs."