|
2023-06-04 Home Front: Politix
|
|
The Debt-Limit Deal Isn’t Actually That Bad
|
[Spectator] You just had to have a reasonable set of expectations, that’s all.
My instinct is to join with Rep. Chip Roy and the House Freedom Caucus, who have condemned the deal as, in Roy’s phrasing, a "turd sandwich." Frankly, I would have been perfectly happy to defend an impasse and a default or government shutdown until Joe The Big Guy Biden
 ...46th president of the U.S. We get to suffer the consequences...
and the Democrats got down on their slimy knees and begged for quarter, and surrendered to the initial debt-limit legislation that Kevin McCarthy
Continued from Page 4
...the GOP house majority whip. He replaces Eric Cantor, who got whupped because his politix are like Kevin McCarthy's...
and the House Republicans passed.
In fact, I’m mostly perplexed that McCarthy and the House GOP didn’t make more of the fact that their debt-limit package was the only one in town. Let’s remember how weird this whole thing is — Biden and the Democrats spent three months doing absolutely nothing after the House passed the Limit, Save, Grow Act other than screeching about how awful it was and demanding a "clean" debt-limit bill.
But they never actually passed a debt-limit bill in the Senate, and that, at the end of the day, is the real story of this whole saga. Why didn’t Chuck Schumer
...Senator-for-life from New York, renowned for his love of standing in front of cameras and microphones. Schumer has been a professional politician since 1975, when disco was in flower, which is 47.49226 years. Senate minority leader as of 2017...
and his 51-vote majority in the Senate not just pass a clean debt-limit bill? Had they done that, McCarthy would have been steamrolled on this issue.
The answer is that Schumer couldn’t get to 51 votes to pass such a bill. He couldn’t get all of his own people to vote for it.
So yes — the Democrats are weaker on this issue than they’ve been on anything in a colossally long time.
And polling on the debt limit shows it’s actually better than a 60—40 issue for the GOP. Better, because the 60 percent is for simply making spending cuts in exchange for a debt-limit hike. There’s another 15 percent that says don’t raise the debt limit at all and make the federal government take a massive haircut. It’s actually a 60—24 issue for the GOP.
I’m pretty close to being in the 15 percent, by the way.
But McCarthy did the deal with Biden, and now he’s getting crushed by the Freedom Caucus and other conservatives. Maybe rightly so.
But on the other hand, maybe not.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich
...former Speaker of the House, author of the Contract with America. Gingrich gave the country welfare reform and a balanced budget and the Publicans a landslide House victory in 1994. On the downside, he has a roving eye and a loose fly, he's opinionated, and he's abrasive despite his ability to work with the other side of the political aisle...
, who’s the only Republican leader in modern history to truly win one of these fights, took up for McCarthy in an op-ed. The gist of Gingrich’s analysis was in the takeaways from the deal McCarthy negotiated:
Consider what this new debt ceiling agreement, the Fiscal Responsibility Act, accomplishes for conservatism:
- It cuts spending year-over-year, including a rollback of nondefense discretionary spending to FY22 levels — while fully funding the Veterans Administration’s medical programs.
- It limits topline federal spending to 1% annual growth for the next six years — a huge cut from the Biden budget proposal.
- It will help lift millions out of poverty by enacting work requirements for food stamps and welfare benefits. The 1996 welfare reform bill made virtually the same changes. This will mean more Americans will be working and paying taxes, and fewer Americans will depend on the government. This has big, long-term government and human benefits.
- It claws back tens of billions in unspent COVID-19 funds, including $400 million from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s "Global Health Fund" that would have sent taxpayer money to China.
- Billions more will be cut other programs, making this the largest total rescissions package in history.
- The deal puts in place the first-ever statutory administrative pay-as-you-go rule to hold President Biden accountable for the full cost of executive rules and regulations. This should save taxpayers trillions of dollars.
- It cuts red tape and streamlines important infrastructure and energy projects — and cuts costs with the first significant reform to environmental policy since 1982.
- It slashes funding for Biden’s new IRS
...the Internal Revenue Service; that office of the United States government that collects taxes and persecutes the regime's political enemies...
agents and eliminates the total fiscal year 2023 staffing funding request for new agents.
- It restarts student loan repayments and requires borrowers to be responsible for paying off their student loan debts, saving taxpayers an estimated $5 billion per month
- It has a bold requirement to "Make Congress Work Again" by compelling a functioning appropriations process and imposing a temporary 99% continuing resolution level cap until all 12 appropriations bills are passed and become law.
- It protects senior citizens, veterans and our national security by fully funding critical veterans’ programs and defense priorities, while preserving Social Security and Medicare.
- It blocks Democrat demands for new taxes and reject all $5 trillion of Biden’s proposed tax increases.
Again, this agreement is a powerful first step.
Gingrich says what’s coming is a 10-year budget plan that House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, will be producing soon, and then we’ll have a whole series of knock-down, drag-out appropriations fights this fall that lead up to the next "crisis" at the end of the year. That’s when there has to be a budget or at least a continuing resolution to fund the government — or else we get to a shutdown.
Are those 12 points Gingrich raises worth giving out $4 trillion in debt-limit increases? I’m not going to tell you how to think about that. My own response to that is "meh."
I do like No. 10, though, because what it means is Congress will be limited to spending only 99 percent of what it spent the previous year until we return to the budget process — and that means no stalling the budget after it comes out of the House. Nobody’s talking about that, but it’s actually a fun little provision of this deal.
Overall, I can’t get excited about this stuff, but I also can’t get too angry about it, either.
Mostly because I never expected anything but a turd sandwich.
Really, what I expected was that Biden and the Democrats would fulfill the role of the psychopath McCarthy was forced to play chicken against. I actually expected them to stick to the demand for a "clean" debt-limit hike that Schumer couldn’t even pass in the Senate. I expected them to make McCarthy negotiate against himself all summer as the federal debt hit the limit and the damage started to pile up.
Because the pattern would then indicate a complete collapse of the GOP’s majority. Last week, the House Democrats started circulating a discharge petition of that "clean" debt-limit increase they couldn’t pass in the Senate, and all of them signed it. They only needed five Republicans to commit political seppuku and sign on.
Which right now would be an absolutely ludicrous demand on their part. But in a month or two, with stocks taking a beating and the banks and credit markets seizing up? Maybe not so implausible.
I really expected they would be that intransigent. And if you listen to the Democrats in the aftermath of this deal being announced, I don’t think I was all that wrong.
They’re actually talking about moving on from Biden now. Not that they shouldn’t have been all along, or that the words haven’t already been spoken, but it seems louder this week.
Making all of those concessions might have been what finished him off. I’m assuming it won’t finish McCarthy off, though maybe I shouldn’t.
Gingrich insists that the debt deal, which they’re calling the Fiscal Responsibility Act (a title that’s pretty hard to endorse, let’s be honest; authorizing the addition of $4 trillion in federal debt doesn’t exactly scream "fiscal responsibility," after all), is a win for the GOP. And to be fair, the Congressional Budget Office scores this thing as shaving $2.1 trillion off the federal budget over the next 10 years, which comes out to $210 billion a year — a little better than 40 percent of the savings the Limit, Save, Grow Act would have offered.
So it’s a kinda-sorta meet-in-the-middle compromise. For now. But here’s the thing: McCarthy established a precedent that you can get Democrats to agree to spending cuts and other Republican demands in exchange for debt-limit increases. That, regardless of what complaints there might be about this deal, is a crucially important win.
Whether it’s appreciated or not, I can’t predict. But it’s a big thing, because now, when it’s time to raise the debt ceiling, McCarthy, or whoever is negotiating for the GOP on the debt limit (when it comes back up again in January of 2025, it had better be Donald Trump
...dictatorial for repealing some (but not all) of the diktats of his predecessor, misogynistic because he likes pretty girls, homophobic because he doesn't think gender bending should be mandatory, truly a man for all seasons......
or Ron DeSantis at the top of the food chain, or else we’re going to have bigger problems than this), can open the conversation with a whole raft of Republican demands that had better be met or else there are going to be draconian budget cuts in order that the federal government doesn’t need to borrow any more money or raise the debt limit to do so.
Maybe McCarthy didn’t maximize the use of his leverage. But I would say he has at least preserved it. And this problem is going to take a long time, and multiple steps, as Gingrich notes, before it’s solved. So leverage on the debt limit is the single most important asset the Right has in American politics, and using it without using it up deserves some positive recognition.
But what I’ll also say is that Arrington’s budget had better be good. And McCarthy had better have his troops ready for those appropriations fights. Because this is barely a skirmish in one battle in a very big war to come.
|
Posted by trailing wife 2023-06-04 00:00||
||
Front Page|| [11138 views ]
Top
|
|
Posted by Skidmark 2023-06-04 05:43||
2023-06-04 05:43||
Front Page
Top
|
|
Posted by Super Hose 2023-06-04 07:45||
2023-06-04 07:45||
Front Page
Top
|
|
Posted by Procopius2k 2023-06-04 07:53||
2023-06-04 07:53||
Front Page
Top
|
|
Posted by Besoeker 2023-06-04 08:04||
2023-06-04 08:04||
Front Page
Top
|
|
Posted by DooDahMan 2023-06-04 09:31||
2023-06-04 09:31||
Front Page
Top
|
|
Posted by Besoeker 2023-06-04 09:48||
2023-06-04 09:48||
Front Page
Top
|
|
Posted by DooDahMan 2023-06-04 09:53||
2023-06-04 09:53||
Front Page
Top
|
|
Posted by NoMoreBS 2023-06-04 12:12||
2023-06-04 12:12||
Front Page
Top
|
|
09:43 Mullah Richard
09:27 Warthog
09:11 Mercutio
09:07 AlmostAnonymous5839
08:52 Matt
08:24 Matt
08:20 SteveS
07:43 Procopius2k
07:42 BrerRabbit
07:42 Procopius2k
07:39 Procopius2k
07:36 Procopius2k
07:35 Procopius2k
07:34 trailing wife
07:31 Procopius2k
07:30 NN2N1
07:22 NN2N1
07:18 trailing wife
07:14 Richard Aubrey
07:10 NN2N1
07:09 Besoeker
07:03 NN2N1
06:58 NN2N1
06:58 Besoeker
|
