More on that Incredible Shrinking Spending Cut: According to a new CBO report, the six-month continuing resolution passed in April and heralded as a “historic” cut in discretionary spending will actually result in an increase in outlays of about $3 billion. From the CBO director’s blog:

Total discretionary outlays in 2011 will be $3.2 billion higher as a result of the legislation, CBO estimates—an increase of $7.5 billion for defense programs, partially offset by a net reduction of $4.4 billion in other spending. (Part of the reason that total outlays will increase this year is that some defense funding was shifted from slower-spending to faster-spending activities.) CBO had previously estimated that the full-year appropriation act will yield a net reduction of $0.4 billion in nonemergency outlays in 2011. (Look here for additional information about CBO’s estimates of enacted 2011 appropriations.) The comparison issued today is different: It includes emergency appropriations, excludes the effects of changes in mandatory programs, and incorporates adjustments to various estimating parameters that were applied to the appropriation act to make them consistent with the March 2011 baseline.

Does this deal continue to look worse and worse the more we find out about it? No doubt it does. But even though that’s the case, the likes of TPM — who snicker “OOPS!” in response to the report, as if the news that Washington is powerless to stop ballooning spending even when it wants to is a welcome amusement — are also engaging in some selective emphasis. As the bolded bit above suggests, actual outlays can go up when the rate of spending increases, even as total spending authority decreases. It’s still the case that the C.R. cuts the government’s authority to spend money by $38 billion compared to the baseline and by $78 billion compared to the president’s proposed alternative. Over ten years, it cuts spending authority by $183 billion, and that number doesn’t even include cuts to mandatory programs like the Pell grants, which for arcane legislative reasons don’t “score” as part of it. Those numbers aren’t illusory — as Holtz-Eakin put it here, cuts are cuts. It’s $183 billion less than Uncle Sam would have spent had we enacted the president’s nifty sounding “spending freeze” and who knows how many hundreds of billions less than would have been spent had Congressional Democrats had their way.

The C.R. was a drop in the bucket, but it was a real drop. Now let’s see about shrinking the bucket.

UPDATE: A helpful e-mail from a reader:

I’ve long wondered if there was a simple, clear way to talk about federal budgeting that most people would get intuitively. It would help us politically.
One way might be to liken it to arguing about how big an annual deposit to make into the family’s checking account…but, knowing that what you end up spending for that year—actually writing checks for–won’t even be capped by that deposit you ultimately decide to make because:
1. There’s money in the account left over from last year, and the year before, and the year before….
2. You won’t spend all of the money you decide to put in this year, because….oh well, lots of reasons, but see number 1. Above…
So back to the argument about how much to deposit into the checking account this year…your wife has larger spending plans, so she argues for a larger deposit…even including borrowing from the home equity line, since your projected earnings won’t quite make it, but you win the argument, and you both decide to deposit less (still borrowing from the home equity line, just borrowing less)
Your accountant then looks at the budget plans for this year, does some arithmetic, makes some guesses about when some bills will be due and when others might actually get paid, and says…now wait for this…you guys are on course to spend a little more than you actually spent last year.
You have deposited less into your checking account than your wife wanted to…borrowing less from the Home Equity line…..and, you may even have deposited less in the checking account than you did last year….we didn’t ask that question when we were arguing about how much to deposit, but you are going to spend more than you did last year?…well maybe…..
What you decided to deposit into the checking account is not tightly tied to how much you end up actually writing checks for in that year…..except in the following way….
If you deposit less each year, over time, you will actually spend less than you would have otherwise. If you deposit a lot less each year, you will over time actually spend a lot less. The key words are “over time.”
All of this, of course, leaves out lots of other detail…emergencies, supplemental appropriations, internal changes in actual spending plans for all kinds of reasons, etc., etc.