Josh Barro, Columnist

Yes, the 1990 Budget Deal Spending Cuts Were Real

December 27, 2012 at 10:46 PM UTC

Josh Barro is the lead writer for the Ticker, Bloomberg View's blog on economics, finance and politics. His primary areas of interest include tax and fiscal policy, state and local government, and planning and land use. Previously, Barro was a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a commercial real estate banker at Wells Fargo. He holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Harvard and lives in Queens, New York.

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When you talk with conservatives about why they resist deficit-cutting deals, a response you often hear is that these deals produce real tax increases and illusory spending cuts. As my Bloomberg View colleague Ezra Klein discussed earlier this week, conservatives who won't cut a deal say they simply won't be fooled again.

But the deal conservatives hate most, the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990 (the one where President George H.W. Bush broke his "no new taxes" pledge) really did cut spending as promised. The claims that it didn't are based on bad math.