Three Charts That Show That Republicans Have Won The Budget War

A lot of conservatives are griping about the new budget deal that boosts short-term spending slightly.

But the fact of the matter is that the GOP has won the budget wars.

The first one comes from Michael Linden and compares the different budget proposals over the past couple of years to the Murray-Ryan compromise:

The spending in the Murray-Ryan deal is less than in the original Ryan budget!

The second one comes from Paul Krugman today and show the real three-year changes in total government spending:

Spending has declined faster since 2008 than it did at any point in the past 50 years.

And yet, despite this steep austerity, conservatives are the ones who oppose the deal. This final graph from Scott Winship shows the absurdity of that position:

The Murray-Ryan deal raises spending slightly in the next two years, but returns to the original path of sequestration in 2016. The rise in spending is minor, yet conservative groups are furious.

This gets to the heart of the conservative position. We've passed an unprecedented amount of austerity during the Obama presidency, more than even Paul Ryan originally envisioned. You would think that liberals would be the ones enraged by these budget deals, but they're not. It's the right-wing groups for whom no amount of budget cuts are ever enough.