How Did We End Up with 19 Stupid Republican Senators?

            The U.S. Senate passed a $1.1trillion infrastructure spending bill with a vote of 69-30 – all 50 Democrat Senators and 19 Republican Senators. The 19 Republicans included Alaskan Senators, Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan. Alaskan voters may be forced to get rid of Sullivan once they vote Murkowski out in 2022. The infrastructure bill is filled with all the spending priorities of the liberals. 

            Now that the Senate passed the infrastructure bill, the Senators will now consider a budget resolution. Mathew Dickerson wrote that the budget resolution “if enacted, will clear a path to implement a massive progressive agenda. This resolution would reshape the American economy and permanently expand government control over many aspects of peoples’ lives.” He listed nine things that we “need to know about this budget resolution.” 

1. Kickstarts the Process to Pass Controversial and Harmful Polices on a Partisan Basis

The primary motivation behind this budget resolution is to kick off the budget reconciliation process. Budget reconciliation allows legislation affecting spending, revenue, or debt limit to pass the Senate with limited debate and by

51 votes instead of being subject to the normal 60-vote threshold….

2. Raises Revenue, Makes Misleading Claims, and Gives Congress Unchecked Authority to Increase Taxes

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders said in a press release, “Under this budget, however, no family making under $400,000 a year will pay a penny more in taxes and will, in fact, receive one of the largest tax cuts in American history.” This statement is false.

Although President Joe Biden has misleadingly claimed that his child allowance proposal would provide a tax cut, Heritage Foundation analysts Robert Rector and James Hall have shown that, “when fully implemented, the plan offers no tax relief at all. Instead, the essential impetus is to fully and permanently eliminate work requirements and work incentives from the existing child tax credit program….

Instead of tax relief for working families, the reconciliation bill contemplated by this budget will include damaging tax increases borne by middle-income families….

In fact, the reconciliation instructions give the congressional committees with jurisdiction over the tax code an unlimited ability to increase taxes while avoiding the filibuster. Further, this budget includes an entire reserve fund dedicated to, essentially, increasing tax burdens on every employer and innovator in the country….

3. Reckless Spending Spree

Democrats’ own estimates are that this budget would increase federal spending by more than $4.16 trillion through fiscal year 2031. However, it’s also important to see how much they want to increase spending in just the first year: at least $1.75 trillion.

 

4. Path to a Debt Crisis

Not only would this plan increase the publicly held debt by more than $4.16 trillion, bringing it to more than 118% of gross domestic product, but it would leave us with well over $2.2 trillion annual deficits by fiscal year 2031 just on the net interest for the federal debt.

5. Recipe for Inflation

While some of the recent trend of higher inflation is related to the pandemic, it is mostly the result of our reckless federal fiscal policy – which this budget would double down on….

To compound this crisis, the Federal Reserve would likely print trillions of more dollars to finance a portion of this deficit spending….

The exponentially higher rates of deficit spending, taxation, and money printing that would result from this budget would only serve to exacerbate the current inflationary trend.

6. Breaking Biden’s Infrastructure Promise

During this summer’s negotiations over the bipartisan infrastructure bill, many conservatives warned that any concessions made by Democrats would be undone by using reconciliation to get the rest of what the left wants for urban transit and passenger rail.

To keep Republicans at the negotiating table, Biden said he was willing to give up some of the transportation spending that he wanted, and reserve reconciliation for areas not related to infrastructure….

The Senate budget resolution breaks this promise by giving $60 billion in reconciliation instructions to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, on top of the $1.1 trillion infrastructure deal….

This shows that months of infrastructure negotiations were done in bad faith.

7. Loopholes and Gimmicks

The point of a budget is to establish responsible fiscal priorities and set up guardrails to assure Congress meets those goals.

However, this budget resolution is filled with loopholes and gimmicks that will make it easier to increase spending….

8. Mistaken Priorities

Despite the trillions in higher spending in this budget resolution, it still manages to shortchange the core constitutional responsibility of national security….

9. Fails to Address the Biggest Fiscal Challenges

This budget resolution fails to tackle the nation’s most important fiscal challenges, while likely making future reforms to forestall a crisis even more difficult. Any meaningful fiscal reform must tackle the unsustainable entitlement programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, subsidies for private health insurance, and Social Security….

            Dickerson includes much more information with charts to show detail. I encourage you to go to his article to find more information. His conclusion is that “Congress must reject this budget resolution” and “follow a responsible fiscal path that begins to confront the problem of overspending and a federal government that is already too burdensome and unsustainable.”

            I do not have hope that Congress will reject this budget resolution because Democrats will stick together to pass it. With the 50 Democrats, plus the Vice President, they have the 51 votes necessary to succeed. Republicans lost their ability to stop it when they voted for the infrastructure bill. We might as well say “Hello to inflation” and apologize to our posterity for the stupidity of this Congress.