This Is Worst Budget Deal GOP Has Negotiated Since First Bush
The last deal this bad was when H.W. violated the no new taxes pledge.
Halloween is looking especially scary this year. On Monday, Republican leaders in Congress declared an unconditional fiscal surrender to President Barack Obama and the left, negotiating a dangerous budget deal that eliminates all of the checks on Washington’s spend-and-borrow binge by breaking the budget caps, ending the sequester and raising the debt ceiling by over $1 trillion.
It’s the worst budget deal to be negotiated by the GOP since George H.W. Bush violated his no new taxes pledge in 1990 at Andrews Air Force Base.
The result of that capitulation was to make Bush a one-term president and to split the Republican party right down the middle. This deal has the same catastrophic potential.
Here are some of the fiscal facts that make this such a betrayal. A Heritage Foundation analysis finds that federal spending in 2016 was already expected to climb by more than $200 billion. This was to be a 5 percent rise in outlays in a year when inflation is barely above zero.
Under this budget deal, the spending caps rise by an extra $80 billion over two years, the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) slush fund receives another $147 billion in “emergency spending,” and the debt limit is suspended through March 15, 2017.
So now we are going to see a $430 billion hike in spending in 2016. That’s close to a12 percent spending spree.
In addition to this, discretionary spending increases are evenly split between defense and nondefense programs. It raises the fiscal year 2016 defense cap to $548.1 billion from $523 billion, and it raises the fiscal year 2016 nondefense cap to $518.5 billion from $493.5 billion
If this goes through, the caps and sequester are dead. All fiscal discipline is tossed out the window. House Speaker John Boehner has negotiated away his greatest legacy: the 2011 Budget Control Act. He said he was going to “clean out the stables” but instead he left a giant mess for incoming speaker Paul Ryan.
Obama says this will mean entitlement reforms, but those are long term and minor.
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