Congress crowing about doing what it should have — long ago
Richard Fulton
Hypocrisy reigned this week.
I try hard not to be too cynical about today’s politics, but this week makes it very, very hard.
The first example is the false triumph being trumpeted by Democrat and Republican leaders alike. They passed an omnibus piece of legislation that reeks of hypocrisy.
The disgraced House Speaker John Boehner got together with the White House to deal with the impending legislation limiting the federal deficit and the passing of a budget outline for 2016-17 fiscal year.
First of all, the deficit limit is a joke.
Congress, the Republican-led Congress, has passed spending bills that obligate the federal government to spend all those billions of dollars. But they don’t raise the money to pay for those billions.
That means they authorized deficit spending. Then when the deficit gets close to busting through that politically based deficit limit, there arises a crisis that threatens the credit of the United States.
This is a dangerous game since Republican hard-liners threaten to not approve extension of the debt limit, allowing America to pay its bills, if they don’t get their way on other fiscal issues. The Republican leadership has been unable to deal with its own caucus to solve the problem.
A budget has not been set for some time by the Legislature.
Remember, spending has two phases — passing a budget that sets guidelines for spending and then passing authorization bills to actually spend the monies within budget guidelines.
What the House did this week was to pass a budget that sets limits on what Congress can spend. In so doing, they made compromises with the White House. They set a limit of spending increases not to exceed $80 billion for the 2016-17 fiscal year.
Not a dime was spent, but promises were made.
Half of the $80 billion increase would go to military spending and half to domestic programs. Both of these dump the 2011 bill that put a cap on spending in an effort to do something about the federal deficit. So much for that effort.
Mind you, there were several ways to pay for this outlined in the compromise.
Less for federal support for crop insurance, for example. Cuts in a Medicare program while alleviating increases in Medicare B increases —by borrowing more long term.
As for the deficit limit legislation, it was suspended until 2017 — after the next election. Let’s protect ourselves from this nasty issue while seeking reelection, legislators said. Several other side deals on cuts and military spending are in the bill too.
Republican leaders hail the deal, but truth to tell, their members voted 2-1 against it. Democrats passed the thing.
All this on top of the hypocrisy of passing a military spending bill earlier that left out of the budget numbers an added $39 billion for extra military spending.
All deficit spending. Republicans love to rail against the budget deficits but don’t mind sneaky deficit spending.
Don’t get me started on the hypocrisy of the Republicans in their debate this week.
They rant and rave against big government while insisting upon more for Social Security and Medicare protections. They, and Democrats to be sure, jack up the military budget to protect their local bases and often useless military equipment.
They blame Obama and the “mainstream media” (what is Fox if not mainstream?) for all our troubles and forget Bush and 2008.
They list all the terrible things about America today, making you feel like America is in great decline while posing as patriots.
Worse of all, both Democrats and Republicans tell us what a great thing they have done with America’s finances this week by doing what should have been done a year ago.
And should have been done more honestly, openly, and better.
Okay, you did your job, now shut up about it.
