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The Real Problem With Funding the Government
April 7, 2011 - by Donny Shaw
After meeting late Wednesday night with House Speaker John Boehner [R, OH-8], Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid [D, NV] took to the floor this morning and said that agreeing on a topline budget number isn’t the thing blocking a deal on preventing a government shutdown Friday night, it’s social policy. “Our differences are no longer over the savings we get on government spending, Reid said. “The only thing holding up an agreement is ideology.”
When the House passed the budget bill, the Republican majority added an unprecedented number of policy riders to it, touching on just about every major political issue you can think of. While budgets always affect social policy, decisions on which programs to cut and which to fund should be made in the regular appropriations process that allows for committee review and public input. Of course, the Democrats failed to complete the appropriations process last year when they controlled Congress, and that’s why we now have to do the budget through a continuing resolution. But that doesn’t justify the Republicans bypassing congressional deliberation and public review now.
For a taste of the policy riders that are currently in the budget bill and preventing the Democrats and Republicans from reaching a deal, I’ve highlighted a dozen or so below. Links go to the actual legislative text of the riders.
- defunding Planned Parenthood.
- defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which helps fund NPR, PBS and other public media.
- blocking EPA from regulating greenhouse gases.
- blocking funds for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
- blocking the FCC from implementing their open internet rules.
- blocking Education Department from implementing a program that would restrict federal student aid to for-profit colleges whose students have high debt-to-income ratios.
- defunding implementation of all provisions of the new health care law.
- blocking an Interior Department effort to protect public natural spaces.
- blocking funding of a new “consumer products complaints database.”
- blocking the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the US for any reason.
- blocking the payment of salaries for 9 Obama Administration policy advisers.
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Displaying 1-30 of 51 total comments.
If we can’t afford it…we can’t afford it. That being said, We need to stop funding an organization that we pioneered that now dislikes us…The UN. Especially, and after Obama redirected what NASA does saying he wants them to study Climate change, and NASA has recently said that the famed theory of Global Warming being a result of terrestrail beings, is bunk! Planned parenthood is better suited as done by NPO’s and individual community work. The FCC is a draconian agency that actually should be almost completely dismantled. U.S> Constitution forbids the government from having any power over the internet, especially since it is a global network. The EPA has gone around Congress and behind the backs of this country to impliment regulation on greenhouse gasses that congress voted down laws year. Draconian and illegal. Cut that funding for sure. Cap and Trade was voted down. I could go on and on but I will not…I hope you get the picture. Sorry. GOP is right on this one.
We have a budget deficit because multi-national corporations and the richest 1% don’t pay their share of, if any, taxes.
Further why isn’t there anything about reducing military spending, which takes up FAR MORE of our budget than all of these combined and multiplied.
The GOP is a joke and the Dems aren’t much better at this point.
If you don’t have money in your bank account you just don’t spend money. It’s that simple. The Government does not have money in the bank so we just don’t spend it. I would go to jail if I handled money the way the Government does. so we just can’t spend what we don’t have. It realy is that simple!
We have a budget deficit because the government spends too much money plain and simple.
From the foundation of our country up until the day Obama got elected we overspent 10 trillion dollars which is inexcusable. But Obama’s administration has been the worst of all previous administrations. While it took a little over 200 years to spend us into a 10 trillion dollar deficit, Obama has managed to spend nearly nearly 5 trillion more dollars in deficit spending in just 2 years! Don’t tell me that it is because the rich don’t pay taxes.
And in a day when we face terrorist threats from every border you suggest we should cut our military funding? The government’s job is to protect the American people from foreign threats not to be our nanny.
1. Invest in the military.
2. Cut spending.
3. Create jobs by cutting taxes.
4. Let the free market drive the economy.
That is the formula for getting us out of this crisis.
I think you’re right on. The Free market will drive the economy if given the tools and freedom to do so
Please do some research before you make such a ridiculous statement. The top 1% of income earners (those making $380,354 or higher) paid 38.02% of all taxes in 2008. That’s nearly double the tax income for which they were responsible in 1980 when they accounted for 19.08% of all tax income. The top marginal tax rate in 1980 was double today’s 35%.
http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/ff249.pdf
http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/fed_individual_rate_history-20110323.pdf
middle class wages have been stagnant for the last 30 years, while upper income earnings have been sky rocketing.
The reason the upper brackets paid a larger percentage of the taxes is directly because the lower brackets don’t have the money anymore.
PS,
End the Bush tax holiday(hell End the Reagan tax holiday for that matter)!!!
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I don’t buy into the Austrian/Neo Classical economic religions. Their economic “theories”(and I use the term loosely in this case) ignore all of the developments and understanding we have accumulated over the last 80 years or so, typically they follow closer to a ideology of anarchy, racism(in the case of Von mises), and “self evident axioms”.
The theories we have now still have holes in them large enough to drive trains through, but they are much closer to reality to any of the nonsense pushed by Hayek.
In all cases with economic “theory” more often that not it is all designed to prop up the ideological belief of how one wishes or thinks the world should work rather then in fact a serious study of how in fact it does work.
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To be clear the Fed hasn’t printed a lot of money, this is an illusion coming from a misunderstanding of how the fractional reserve system works.
Nominally, their are two different ways money can enter the economy, via creation of new money(the way you point out), and via federal reserve discount window where a bank can barrow money up to the accepted leverage ratio allowed to banks(currently 15:1).
The Voodoo economics of Reagan, and the supply side bankruptcy have been the basis of our economic policy for the last 30 years or so, not Keynesian theory(and really this is an evolving theory it is not the same as it was).
It is not a misunderstanding, it is seeing the fractional reserve system for what it is. Creating money out of thin air and thereby decreasing the real value of the existing money in the system.
Fractional reserve banking is predicated thoroughly on the bank being allowed to extend more credit than it has cash on hand – that is creating money out of thin air.
A real money system, not based on fiat currency, is the only way to eliminate the death spiral that our current system is in. As for Reagan’s use of the Laffer curve (what you choose to call Voodoo) was at least an honest attempt to spur the economy into creating jobs. The last two administrations (W and O) have done everything in their power to stifle the economy while pretending that they are doing otherwise – that is voodoo….
I doesn’t just refer to tax rates, it refers to the idea of making money “cheap”, using outsourcing to reduce costs(aka undermine the wages of people who buy things), undermining regulation especially in the area’s of banking and money.
The overall idea that supply of anything creates its own demand, that is “Voodoo” economics.
And I don’t want to make it sound like I support Keynesian theory, It has been used to justify some pretty major stupidity.
But its models for how capital move around an economy, CVT, the velocity of capital, etc all seem to be very correct.
What those things are used to justify, the bailouts and such, while they worked to some extent(they did stop the freefall), they haven’t actually reversed the feedback loop of shrinking deposit levels at the banks damaging their lending capacities(tho this does seem to be closing itself over time by itself).
Thank heavens we have plenty of Credit Unions and community banks that didn’t further inflate the stupidity going on in wall-street.
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When I talk about bailouts I include the $23 trillion dollars spent by the Fed in 2007, TARP, Use of fannie and freddi to hide market failures(rule changes in this organizations by the Bush administration in 2007 forced them to buy a lot of junk mortgage bonds).
The depth of the crisis is completely misunderstood, It would have dragged out much much longer, Remember the last great depression wasn’t pulled out until the government engaged in the largest spending spree ever engaged in ever(World War 2). Right along with the highest tax rates ever( 96% on highest bracket ).
I should have listed the FDIC, and the federal pension guarantee corporation as well.
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Close the tax loop holes on the multi-nationals, agreed. But even if you taxed the richest 1% at 90 – 100% it wouldn’t help. How much tax is enough?
Cut military spending? How about cutting all aid given to foreign countries? Or even, no welfare to illegals?
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If you had read and understood the Constitution at some point in the past you would know that failure to mention something means that the federal government cannot regulate it. The Constitution defines limited powers for a federal government; everything else is left to the states and the people. And yes, before you ask, this does mean that the vast majority of federal government activities are blatantly illegal.
I for one hope the government stays shut down until it obeys its own laws.
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Though it may seem like a minor issue, insinuating that Congress may regulate the internet just because it is not mentioned in the Constitution basically flies in the face of defining characteristic of our particular flavor of federalism. I’m not saying this is exactly what you were getting at, but one of your statements was close enough that I thought I’d chime in.
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