Ron Paul tells it like it is.
What the government does is called baseline budgeting, where you ask for an arbitrary amount, say 100 billion, and when you receive only 70 billion, you have saved 30 billion, even though you spent 50 billion last year.
It is interesting to note that, in the final analysis, the new crop of congressmen ended up with a highly touted 4 billion in cuts. And a lot of that is creative accounting.