The Budget Control Act of 2011 passed as an amendment (S. 365) to the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002 on Monday 1st August 2011.
269 members of congress voted for the legislation and a significant proportion – 161 – voted against it. One such detractor was Republican presidential candidate for 2012, Ron Paul, who stated:
“While it is good to see serious debate about our debt crisis, I cannot support the reported deal on raising the nation’s debt ceiling. I have never voted to raise the debt ceiling, and I never will.
“This deal will reportedly cut spending by only slightly over $900 billion over 10 years. But we will have a $1.6 trillion deficit after this year alone, meaning those meager cuts will do nothing to solve our unsustainable spending problem. In fact, this bill will never balance the budget. Instead, it will add untold trillions of dollars to our deficit. This also assumes the cuts are real cuts and not the same old Washington smoke and mirrors game of spending less than originally projected so you can claim the difference as a ‘cut.’…”
The US Senate will now convene at 09:30 local time on 2nd August 2011 to vote on the bill before the debt ceiling deadline passes later in the day.