One of the chief claims Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., makes in his plan to hike the debt limit is that winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would save $1 trillion. Of course, in reality the wars are ending anyway, so the money would be saved with or without the Reid plan. The Democratic response has been to point fingers at Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., whose Republican budget, they claim, counts the same savings. But the reality is more complicated.
Because Washington rarely actually reduces spending from one year to the next, when lawmakers speak of “cuts,” they’re actually comparing it to some baseline of what spending would be without enacting a given proposal. So there can be quite a lot of argument over which baseline is the most accurate. Should a proposal be compared with President Obama’s budget? The Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of how high spending would be if all the laws on the books were enacted as written? Or the CBO projections based on assumptions about what kind of policies would actually be implemented? When Ryan released his budget in April, he included charts that compared his proposed spending levels to many different baselines so that people could make apples to apples comparisons based on what they think is the fairest baseline. On one of those charts, he noted the war savings, because those were included in the CBO’s own baseline.
