Can kicking or Lucy and the football? (Maybe a little bit of both?)
by digby
I’ve always been something of a believer in kicking the can if there’s no other option, for many of the reasons the Republicans are griping about today:
House Republican leadership unveiled a debt-limit strategy to membership on Monday night, leaving many conservatives wondering what exactly is in the bill for Republicans.
“The bottom line is this: This plan increases spending and raises the debt ceiling. So it makes our financial condition as a country more precarious in the years going forward,” Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama said of the plan, which would add an extra year of mandatory sequestration cuts in order to offset the cost of eliminating reductions to military pensions.
Brooks and others called the additional sequestration cuts, which won’t come until 2024, a gimmick, noting that little Congress might do that far down the line is set in stone. Just look at the original sequestration cuts, which were altered in December’s budget agreement, only nine months after they first took effect.
“Yeah, a decade from now [we’ll get the offset], which to me is no offset at all,” Brooks said. “You have to go through 10 years of Congresses before you have a pay-for for an expenditure that is immediate.”
There is, of course, a real downside to all this. Sequestration sets a budget baseline going far into the future and anyone who tries to raise any spending will have to go to the mattresses every single time to do it. I have very little doubt that the programs progressives care about will be squeezed over and over again while those that have constituencies in the Republican Party will be funded.
That’s what we’re seeing right now. Cutting military retirement benefits were supposed to be the “price” the Republicans had to pay while the Democrats “sacrificed” the federal employee retirement benefits in this latest budget round. The military retirement benefits are being restored. The Federal employees are not. And that’s because only one party believe in retirement benefits for both the military and the Federal workers.
This is how it will go all down the line. We will be paying for that 2011 budget debacle for a very long time. I shouldn’t say “we”. It will be the poor and middle class Americans who need government to help clear a path through our capitalistic jungle. Democratic politicians will undoubtedly be just fine — economically anyway.
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