Today the CBO released its updated score of the Boehner budget proposal and the Reid budget proposal. So we can now do an apples-to-apples comparison of the year-by-year numbers in the two plans, and thereby get a better understanding of the differences between the two. A couple of charts will help.
The first chart shows the impact of the Boehner proposal on federal discretionary outlays. Compared to the March CBO baseline it reduces discretionary outlays by $756 billion over 10 years, which, with interest saving of $156 billion and other smaller changes, reduces the deficit by $917 billion. That is of course a lot less than the $6 trillion in the House budget resolution, but it is a good step in the right direction. The proposal correspondingly increases the debt limit on a nearly dollar-for-dollar basis by $900 billion, which should take us into early 2012. Since this increase will not last through the upcoming presidential election, the proposal also enacts a process to increase the debt limit by another $1.6 trillion with matching spending cuts, which would then last through the end of 2012.
As the chart shows the Boehner plan gets started reducing discretionary outlays in 2012 (by $25 billion) and again in 2013 and then remains well below the baseline.
