The negotiations on the continuing resolution (CR) began yesterday.  The Administration’s new line, echoed by Congressional Democrats, is that their new offer “comes halfway.”

As the players jockey for position they will be throwing out all kinds of confusing numbers. The confusion arises from two factors:

1. Most of the debate centers around “deltas” rather than levels:  the players are talking about the size of proposed cuts rather than the resulting absolute levels.
2. The size of a cut depends upon your choice of starting point.  The players are choosing different starting points from which to measure their deltas.

We can eliminate most of this confusion by focusing on proposed spending levels rather than the proposed changes in those levels.

Yesterday President Obama’s new NEC Director, Gene Sperling, presented the Administration’s perspective on the negotiations.  It’s clear the mantra is “With this proposal we have come halfway.”  I expect the President will start saying this soon.

Update:  Here’s the President in Saturday’s Weekly Radio Address:

My administration has already put forward specific cuts that meet congressional Republicans halfway.  And I’m prepared to do more.

This is called anchoring – trying to frame the negotiations quantitatively to make your own position seem reasonable, and your negotiating partner’s position seem less reasonable.  It appears that neither Congressional Republicans nor the press are buying the Administration’s anchoring.

Here is how the Administration justifies the claim that they have “come halfway” with their new proposal.  As always, you can click on any graph to see a larger version.

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• The Administration uses a figure of $1,128 B (the red bar) for the President’s budget proposal.
• They are comparing that level to the $1,026 B bill passed by House Republicans (H.R. 1, in purple) on a nearly party-line vote.
• The Administration says they have a new proposal (the yellow bar) of $1,077 B.  They get to this number by taking the newly enacted short-term Continuing Resolution (the blue bar), which would lead to $1,083 B of spending if it were extended through the end of this fiscal year on September 30th.  They then (say they will) propose another $6.5 B of cuts relative to this enacted law, bringing them down to $1,077 B.
• They define the negotiating space as the $102 B (purple arrow) between the President’s proposal (red) and the House-passed “Republican” bill (purple).
• They define the distance they have “moved” as the […]