About that $1.3 Trillion Dollar Spending Bill

Sitting here thinking about the hysterical reaction on the Right about the budget deal. 

Foremost among those saying that this is the end of the Trump presidency is Rush Limbaugh. I love Rush and admire his intellect and his instincts.  He reflects the opinion of millions of ordinary people, the people that elected Donald Trump.

So I decided to do a little research. I’m a number guy and when I heard about a budget deal that allocated $1.3 trillion dollars for the next six months I began looking for numbers.  That's a lot of money but what is the perspective?  We always want to ask: compared to what?

Total federal spending has been rising almost every year since 1900, the exception being the years just after WWI and WWII. Federal spending fell sharply after we were no longer at war.  In 2008 spending was $2.98 trillion and in 2009 that figure rose to $3.65 trillion, a 22% jump in one year. The Obama budget for 2017 was $4.15 trillion.

With that as background, it’s hard to determine just how bad the bill that Congress just passed was.  That $1.3 trillion funds the government through October.  Although I have not read the bill I’m willing to admit that the bill apparently funds just about everything that Democrats wanted. That’s just the rumor. Not in the bill  (I’m told) is funding for The Wall, something that Trump campaigned on, his supporters want, and most Congressional Republicans never really supported.

One thing it does is increase defense spending, giving the military an opportunity to rebuild after years of malign neglect by the Obama administration. In an increasingly dangerous world, with challenges from a resurgent Russia, an aggressive China, the global cancer of Islamo-Fascism, and a very dangerous nuclear armed North Korea, fixing the military should be the number one priority of the Trump administration.

But back to the topic: looking at this bill dispassionately, we may register disappointment that the Welfare state is getting a transfusion instead of shrinking, but we refuse to engage in apocalyptic pronouncements with all due respect to our hero, Rush Limbaugh. It could be as bad as he says, but I need to be persuaded that it’s time to give up on Trump.

As a parting thought, the guy in charge of all that spending, the holder of the $1.3 trillion dollar checkbook is none other than Donald John Trump. It will make a big difference.

Sen. Ted Cruz: 'I don’t trust Republicans' (and he's right!)

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said Wednesday that he doesn’t trust members of his own party to negotiate a budget conference report.

Cruz's remark came after Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said he thought it was “bizarre” that a member of his own party was objecting to forming a conference committee with the House to work out a budget.

McCain said the objections suggested Senate Republicans didn’t trust House Republicans to hold the party line in negotiations.

“Isn’t it a little bizarre, this whole exercise?” McCain said after Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) objected to going to conference. “What we’re saying is that we don’t trust our colleagues on the other side of the Capitol.”

Cruz responded that he doesn't trust Republicans.

“The senior senator of Arizona urged senators to trust House Republicans ... and frankly, I don’t trust Republicans,” Cruz said. “It’s the leaders of both parties that got us in this mess. ... A lot of Republicans were complicit in this spending spree.”

McCain said a “small minority of the minority” was blocking progress on the budget and a return to regular order.

But Rubio and Cruz argued that Democrats are trying to use budget reconciliation rules as a back-door way to raise the debt ceiling with just 51 votes, essentially giving "Democrats a blank check." The federal government is expected to reach the debt ceiling this fall.

Senate votes to keep White House closed

Senators nibbled away what they considered the worst parts of the sequester, but they declined to undo President Obama’s decision to cancel White House tours — a move he made earlier this month as one of the casualties of the budget sequesters, ...

 

Carney defends.

John Boehner: The President Is Raging Against a Budget Crisis He Created

John Boehner is not an effective spokesman for either Republicans or Conservatives.  That being said, he's an honest man.  Here's his version of how we got the sequester.

During the summer of 2011, as Washington worked toward a plan to reduce the deficit to allow for an increase in the federal debt limit, President Obama and I very nearly came to a historic agreement. Unfortunately our deal fell apart at the last minute when the president demanded an extra $400 billion in new tax revenue—50% more than we had shaken hands on just days before.

It was a disappointing decision by the president, but with just days until a breach of the debt limit, a solution was still required—and fast. I immediately got together with Senate leaders Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell to forge a bipartisan congressional plan. It would be called the Budget Control Act.

The plan called for immediate caps on discretionary spending (to save $917 billion) and the creation of a special House-Senate "super committee" to find an additional $1.2 trillion in savings. The deal also included a simple but powerful mechanism to ensure that the committee met its deficit-reduction target: If it didn't, the debt limit would not be increased again in a few months.

But President Obama was determined not to face another debt-limit increase before his re-election campaign. Having just blown up one deal, the president scuttled this bipartisan, bicameral agreement. His solution? A sequester.

With the debt limit set to be hit in a matter of hours, Republicans and Democrats in Congress reluctantly accepted the president's demand for the sequester, and a revised version of the Budget Control Act was passed on a bipartisan basis.