Once again, and as expected by any thinking person, we are on track to avoid a fiscal shutdown.
How?
The Spending Deal in the works sloshes enough money around to make enough people happy.
- $1.57 billion for border security, including fencing.
- $2.8 billion increase for opioid addiction treatment, prevention and research.
- $10 billion in new infrastructure funding including $600 million for new high-speed broadband development.
- $307 million more than Trump asked for to combat potential Russian cyberattacks during the U.S. midterm elections. Another $380 million for states to secure their election systems.
- A $1.34 billion increase for the Census to help prepare for the 2020 survey.
- Makes a rail tunnel under the Hudson River that’s a priority of Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, eligible for funding. Leaders have agreed to include $540 million in the bill that could be used to fund a portion of the Gateway project, Politico said.
- So-called sanctuary cities criticized by Trump won’t be defunded. The bill also doesn’t address the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA.
Spread enough favors around and eventually you reach agreement. It’s the way the system works and it’s why deficits keep getting bigger and bigger.
The House is schedule to vote on the Bill Thursday. To avoid a shutdown, the Senate needs to approve the bill by Saturday.
Should a mistake happen, it will quickly be resolved next week by spreading a few more pet projects around.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
There won’t be any meaningful cuts until enough drones grow and wise up sufficiently, to raise serious doubt in the minds of foreigners over America’s willingness to unconditionally rob American children to pay “our” debt.
Once a meaningful, and growing, political movement promising to simply flip creditors the birds takes hold, we’re getting somewhere. Until then, we’re simply not.
It‘s not as if busting their rear to pay for Chuckie’s tunnel, is in any meaningful sense the responsibility of other people’s children, after all. Unless said children’s explicit and uncoerced signature are on those loan documents, they have exactly zero responsibility to pay for any of it. Ditto for the rest of “our” debt. Chuckie can pay for it himself, or those dumb enough to front him the money, can take a loss if he can’t/won’t. Either way, it’s nobody elses responsibility.
The one hope out there is that President Trump may succeed in cutting enough regulations and balancing enough lopsided “Free Trade” deals to allow the US economy to grow enough to begin to balance the budget. And that is a very tenuous hope.
Let’s be serious — in a spending plan for $1,300 Billion, these ~$1 Billion goodies are largely irrelevant. The big driver for spending is the unsustainable so-called “entitlements” — and no-one is seriously calling for cutting those down to a sustainable level.
At the root of the problem lies our fiat currency. Running persistent, widening deficits is the modern equivalence of coin clipping by emperors and kings in ancient times. It always worked for them until it didn’t, same as we’re eventually going to find with Nixon’s “temporary” closing of the gold window in 1971.
The only other option would be for principled leaders to be willing to cut something important to themselves, and demand everyone else do the same, for a fair amount. So Speaker Ryan might accept a $20 billion reduction in military spending in Wisconsin and Ms. Pelosi would have to accept a $20 billion reduction in Medicare spending in Cali. All of that would of course require that the American people willingly elect principled leaders. I think we’ve shown time and again that we won’t do that.
And anyone who rises to protest the further looting of our unborn grand kids is shouted down and/or ridiculed as an airhead out of touch with the times.