That didn’t take long. Recall that just two months ago Speaker John Boehner announced he would abruptly resign right in the middle of his term. He said he was tired of taking gaff from conservative backbenchers on account of his serial sell-outs of even tepid House GOP efforts at fiscal discipline.
We greeted Boehner’s announcement with a Bronx cheer: Good riddance to Johnny Lawnchair, the fastest fold on the Potomac!
Supposedly a new era was dawning under his successor Paul Ryan, but not so. The lawnchair never left—its just got a new occupant.
Now after just 51 days in office Ryan has forced the GOP to walk the plank on what under any honest form of fiscal accounting is a $2.5 trillion addition to the national debt.
Well, make that any form of accounting at all. This whole stinking pile of backroom deals was pushed through so fast that even CBO has not had a chance to fully analyze and score the bill.
In that regard, for the first time in his life, Harry Reid told the truth after this Ryan-Obama midnight special was whisked through the House and Senate. Said the man of legendary forked tongue,
“Sometime in the darkness, the bill was finalized……..no legislation is perfect, but this is good legislation.”
I have said all along the Paul Ryan is a complete fiscal fake. After all, he has spent years braying about the national debt, but never saw a defense program he didn’t want to fund or a bailout that would help his Wisconsin district that he failed to rationalize.
Fiscal conservative? The man voted for the TARP bailout of Wall Street and the bailout of the GM/UAW thieves, too.
And year after year he proposed a “Ryan Budget Reform Plan” that was a complete fraud. He did not remove one dime from social security spending, ever.
Nor did his fiscal plans do anything about the $700 billion in annual cost of Medicare for at least a decade into the future. And he didn’t even bother to balance the Federal budget until 2037!
But what is so obnoxious about this current pork-festooned betrayal of the taxpayers is that it was totally unnecessary.
Ryan could have simply announced that there is a new sheriff in the House and that no one would leave town until New Year’s Eve if need be—unless the pork was excised first and the $680 billion worth of tax benefits, gimmicks and loopholes were either removed or off-set with honest “payfors”.
Needless to say, Speaker Ryan had a totally different take. While this week’s fiscal abomination is just water over the damn, there is always another chance tomorrow:
“Congress can now move into 2016 with a fresh start…..”
No it won’t. This week’s action on the FY2016 omnibus appropriations bill was just another ruse in a moveable fiscal scam which has been underway since the debt ceiling crisis of August 2011.
Back then Congress claimed to cut the 10-year deficit by $2 trillion in return for raising the debt ceiling. And $1.2 trillion of that was to be realized through the so-called appropriations sequester after the super-committee failed to come up with equivalent entitlement and other permanent reforms.
But here’s the skunk in the woodpile. Congress claimed $1.2 trillion in savings from discretionary spending caps over a 10-year period through FY2021, yet appropriations bills are good for only one year. So what it really did was establish a mechanism to have its cake and eat it too.
Because the future year caps are statutory, CBO must dutifully score them as a reduction in the budget baseline every time it does a ten year projection. At the same time, during each annual appropriations cycle, Congress can modify or bust the caps entirely for the current year, and then either take a “one-time” hit to the deficit or find gimmicks to off-set some or all of the cost.
Leave A Comment