Wow. Big blowup in the conservative blogs this week when it turned out the 30-some billion in savings from the latest Boehner-Reid-Obama budget don’t actually happen this fiscal year. They happen in the 2012 fiscal year and later.

If there was a significant amount of money being cut this year, the fact that some of it was also being cut out of later budgets wouldn’t matter so much. The problem is that the only cuts that we can be held to are the ones that happen now, and right now we’re still dealing with little more than rounding errors in the budget. We can’t continue to pay for spending today with non-existent cuts tomorrow. The bipartisan¹ House plan cuts 300 million this year out of over a trillion in overspending. The other 30 billion are from “cuts” from subsequent years’ budgets. But, of course, next year’s budget hasn’t been written yet. It’s all up for renegotiation, and even if those cuts stay in, they can still be replaced by new spending.

In their defense, that’s the way Washington thinks; they probably don’t even view the gimmicks as gimmicks. It’s just the way they’ve always done things. And at least the 2012 and 2013 fiscal years are under this Congress’s watch: both of them are in the same term as everyone who just voted for the 2010 budget.

There are good things about the 2011 budget. It uses the 2010 budget as the baseline, apparently, rather than Obama’s profligate proposal for 2011, which means that those 300 million in cuts really are cuts, as opposed to the “less than what we wanted to increase” that so often pass for cuts.

Do you believe in just passing every expensive program, Father?

For all the faults of the 2011 budget, Obama’s “plan” on Wednesday was far worse. He doesn’t care about the deficit. After submitting a budget proposal last month that made no attempt to cut spending, the President realized that people clearly do want the US to stop going further and further into unsustainable debt. So he promises that if we let him raise taxes² for the next seven years, he can cut spending in the five after that. It’s hard to imagine a more cynical plan: seven years from now he’ll be out of office and won’t be able to keep those promises. The chances of his successor, after seven more years of profligate spending, saying now is the time to cut, is somewhere between T.J. Kong and Mary Benedict. That is to say, Slim and Nun.

The only plans that really do bring spending under control are plans that stop overspending; borrowing is something that should be reserved for emergencies. What are we going to do when a real emergency hits? We’re already borrowing at emergency levels. The only good plans are Paul Ryan’s and Rand Paul’s. Paul’s is by far the better of the two: it removes redundant government bureaucracies. But for that reason it won’t pass: we’re approaching or have passed the bureaucracy event horizon.

We’re trillions of dollars in debt, and adding more trillions every year. We can’t rely on fake cutting tomorrow. We need real cutting today or we’re going to fail when the next emergency arrives. And the longer we go on, the more likely it will be that the emergency will be a financial one of our making.

Spend now, cut tomorrow. Tomorrow never comes. If we really want to cut spending, we need to change the way things have always been done.