The details of the budget cuts agreed to last Friday night for the rest of fiscal 2011 are now out. If you would like to see a summary of these cuts, you can reach it by clicking on the title to this post. There are a few items that merit special attention:
1) The National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts have been reduced by $25 million. Funding for these entities was ended by the original proposal of the GOP. That means that Obama and the Obamacrats put back over a billion dollars in spending on these two items. Simply put, it also means that when your liberal friends tell you that the cuts made had the effect of removing the safety net for the poor and the elderly, you should remind them that there was well over a billion dollars in grants to artists and poets and others like that which were kept rather than keeping the money going to the poor and elderly. And you can tell them that the choice to cut from the poor and the elderly was made by the Democrats. It ought to shut them up.
2) Close to three billion dollars has been cut from high speed rail lines. It was just a few weeks ago that the White House was touting high speed rail as the way to move into tomorrow (by moving back to a 19th century transportaion mode). Although Obama has pushed about ten billion dollars towards high speed rail in a series of projects, state after state has rejected the funds since the states wold be on the hook for operating subsidies on losing rail lines once they were built. This budget cuts seems like an admission by the White House and the Democrats that high speed rail is not the wave of the future.
3) Two small programs included in Obamacare have been eliminated. The two programs had a combined budget of less than two billion dollars, so in Washinton terms, they were not large items. Nevertheless, it is significant that Obama was willing to give up part of the Obamacare package.
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