Actually nobody's talking about actually cutting spending. They're just talking about maybe increasing spending less than they were previously planning to increase it. Crucial distinction, but sadly nobody's taking the media to task for their reporting on this.

S&P's guidance was based on an analysis that made the $2.1T mistake. So $2T+ in cuts plus $2.1T error puts us exactly where we would have been if they were originally right and then we cut $4T.

But we didn't cut that, the deal only cut about a trillion and kicked the other cuts to a super committee.

We did cut that. Where the cuts will come is not yet decided, but that they will come has been finalized.

My reading of the Treasury release is that this all has to do with"baselines". Compared to current spending the deal didn't make cuts at all--spending will continue to increase over the next 10 years. The "cuts" are compared to a projection of what would have been spent without the deal, called a baseline. There are various ways of calculating baseline, i.e. how you account for inflation.It seems that S&P's error was related to misunderstanding which baseline the 2.1T applied to.

I understand that it was relative to baseline. But the bottom line we cut 2.1T out of the budget and S&P had advised 4T. This does highlight the issue of how cutting is done, though. The budget had a trajectory of 10T in spending increases over the next decade and now it will be 2.1T less than that. So we will increase our spending by 7.9T and call it a "cut". :)