- Democrats failed to pass a budget through cowardice.The fiscal year runs from Oct 1 to Sept 30 which means we've been operating without a budget for over 6 months. While past administrations have had trouble getting a budget deal passed before, never have we gone an entire year without a budget, not even in wartime. Now, for the first time in history, we will go without a budget for the fiscal year 2010. The reason why this happened is very simple.
2010 was an election year, and given the bad economy, Democrats knew they were in a tough spot. Historically, sitting administrations lose seats during mid term elections as administrations find it impossible to live up to all of their campaign promises. Given a crashing economy and several unpopular initiatives, Democrats knew that passing a pork laden deficit busting monstrosity would hurt their chances even further.
So they punted. Rather than standing up for their principles and voting their platform, they passed a series of Continuing Resolutions to allow the government to operate without having to go on record as supporting massive deficit spending. - Republicans are not responsible for the failure to reach a budget agreement last year. In the days leading up to the end of the last fiscal year, Democrats controlled the White House and both branches of Congress with veto proof majorities. Republicans couldn't have stopped a Democrat budget if they wanted to. Remember this when the press yammers about Republican obstructionism. The Democrats had the chance to pass their budget and failed to do so.
- Extreme doesn't always mean what we think it means. Right now, Republicans are aiming to reduce spending for the rest of the year by 61 billion dollars. Democrats are saying that's too much, that the cuts are extreme.
But are they really?
Right now, the deficit for this fiscal year is predicted to be $1.6 trillion. That works out to $4.3 billion dollars a day we have to borrow to fund our government. So the cuts the republicans are asking for would make up for just over two weeks of deficit spending. Or to put it another way, we'll reduce the daily amount we have to borrow by $339 million. Wow! That's a lot, right?
Yeah, now we will have to borrow only $4 billion a day instead of $4.3 billion.
Yippee.
The scary thing is that Democrats are railing against this relatively minor spending adjustment as extreme. - Obama is not serious about cutting the budget remember when Obama created a bi-partisan, blue ribbon commission to study the deficit and come up with a plan to cut it down and to balance the budget? remember when they came back with a plan to cut spending by bout $6 trillion over 10 years, resulting in a balanced budget and real job creation?
You don't?
That's ok. Niether does Obama.
His budget ignores nearly every single provision the commission came up with.
Despite the above, all you will hear as we draw closer to Friday is that it's George bush's fault, aided by those extremists in the Tea Party.
