The fiscal cliff deal did much less to reduce the deficit than either political party had promised: It included $750 billion in deficit reduction, a far cry from the $1.8 trillion to $2.5 trillion deficit proposals that the White House and House Speaker John Boehner had put forward earlier in the debate. That’s prompted deficit hawks to insist that much more still needs to be done in the next phase of budget negotiations.
But the Jan. 1 fiscal cliff deal represented just one portion of the deficit reduction that’s been going on since 2011. The Center for American Progress calculates that President Obama and Congress have successfully enacted $2.4 trillion in deficit reduction since the beginning of fiscal year 2011, which began in September 2010.
About one-quarter of that comes from revenues (primarily the fiscal cliff deal) and almost two-thirds from spending cuts: In it’s research, CAP totals up $585 billion in discretionary cuts from the fiscal 2011 budgets passed under a GOP-controlled House and a lame-duck Democratic Congress and a GOP-controlled House. The debt-ceiling debate brought $860 billion in discretionary spending cuts through the Budget Control Act, which CAP calculates is a “10.6 percent reduction from inflation-adjusted 2010 spending levels.” Combined with the fiscal cliff deal and accounting for interest savings, that totals $2.4 trillion in deficit reduction over the past two years, CAP concludes.
