The subheadline for Gene Epstein‘s latest Barron’s cover story tells us “The so-called fiscal cliff has all to do with tax increases and almost nothing to do with spending cuts.” How so?

The fiscal cliff is far less about spending cuts than it is about tax increases. As commonly defined, the fiscal cliff refers to an unusual combination of federal tax hikes coinciding with reductions in federal spending, all of them coming on Jan. 1, 2013. Indeed, a Wall Street Journal front-page story last week spoke, for example, of “deep, automatic federal-spending cuts and tax increases.”

Wrong. White the tax increases will certainly be steep, the “deep” spending cuts are much shallower. More important, the spending cuts will be more than offset by inexorable increases in the cost of entitlement programs. The net result will be no reduction in federal spending. The cuts popularly cited mainly consist of automatic reductions under the 2011 Budget Control Act that require equal dollar cuts in defense and nondefense programs starting in fiscal 2013, through an action known as sequestration. Painful as those cuts may be, however, they are not enough to cause the government’s overall spending to decline. Projections by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and the White House’s Office of Management and Budget both show that overall dollar spending won’t decrease in calendar year 2013. What all the projections do show is a much slower rate of increase.