Tag Archives: spending

Siding with the Extremists

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President Joe Biden (D) not only advised his Progressive-Democrats in the House to hold off on trying to pass the “infrastructure” bill. This is the bill, remember, that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) had so solemnly promised the more moderate members of Party she would bring to the floor for a vote on 27 Sept. Then after breaking that promise, she promised to have the vote on 29 Sept, then promised 30 Sept, then 1 Oct, then canceled the vote altogether, for a total of four solemn cynical promises broken.

No, that wasn’t all for Biden. He then made his own promise late Friday to the House Progressive-Democratic Party caucus in a closed door meeting in one of their House conference rooms. The “infrastructure” bill

ain’t going to happen until we reach an agreement on the next piece of legislation[.]

That next piece of legislation is the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill he and his fellows are so anxious to get enacted.

With that commitment, Biden repeated and renewed the promise he made last June to not sign the “infrastructure” bill until he also had his reconciliation bill on his desk. With that renewed commitment, Biden broke earlier, campaign and inauguration speech promises to unite our nation and to govern in a bipartisan manner.

Biden has, instead, openly and irretrievably united with the most progressive of the Progressive-Democrats—the extreme Left of a Party that already has gone far Left.

Wrong Answer

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Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen wants Congress’ authority over the debt ceiling abolished.

She argued Congress makes the decisions on taxes and spending, so it should also provide the ability to pay those obligations.
“If to finance those spending and tax decisions, it’s necessary to issue additional debt, I believe it’s very disruptive to put the president and myself, the Treasury secretary, in a situation where we might be unable to pay the bills that result from those past decisions[.]”

This would, of course, mean that the concept of a debt ceiling itself would be removed.

Wrong answer.

The right answer, which would make a debt ceiling unnecessary (although not abolish it), is to limit spending to within revenues.

Of course, to prevent Congress from running away with tax rates, as the current Progressive-Democrat-run Congress is attempting to do, it would be necessary to limit Congress’ ability to raise tax and fee rates or to create new taxes or fees. One way to achieve that would be to define a priori the specific purpose of each individual tax or fee increase and each individual new tax or fee and then put each one, individually and separately, to a national plebiscite. If the plebiscite rejects the proposition, then the associated spending cannot occur and existing spending must remain within existing revenues.

A fillip: financial planners recommend individual families each maintain a rainy day/emergency fund of some months’ worth of expenses. Texas, and some other States, also do this at the State level. It would be useful if Federal spending were required to be limited to 90% of Federal revenues until a national level emergency fund were accumulated—say an amount equal to a year’s worth of established Federal spending. A year, rather than the several months that planners recommend for individuals, because of the Federal government’s empirically demonstrated profligacy.

Another fillip: index the size of the Federal Emergency Fund to positive inflation as measured by the Producer Price Index or its successor. Positive inflation: the required level of the FEF could never decrease, even in a deflationary environment.

Of course, this would require a Constitutional Amendment in order to be permanent.

Oh, and never mind the horror of Yellen being inconvenienced by the tasks of her job.

Worrying about the Wrong Time Frame

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A Wall Street Journal opinion piece subheadline well summarizes the piece itself:

the Speaker pushes Democrats to take votes that will end careers in 2022

The WSJ‘s Editors write this as if they take the matter seriously. But they, and far too many others who also should know better, are taking far too short a view.

“Career ending” votes were taken in favor of Obamacare, too. Obamacare survives, and here is the Progressive-Democratic Party back in power.

So it will be with the Progressive-Democrat reconciliation bill and the pre-amendment to it that is the “infrastructure” bill. A few Progressive-Democrats might lose their seats as they vote to force passage, but these two destructive bills will live on.

And, dangerously, the Progressive-Democratic Party will recover.

This is Backwards

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In a Wall Street Journal article on the difficulty of estimating ridership on roads and highways to be built in the future and so the need for them, and the poor allocations of costs and Federal dollars that result from the inaccuracies, there was this statement.

If lawmakers enact the $550 billion bipartisan infrastructure bill now before the House, state and local officials will have to decide which projects to spend money on.

This is backwards. State and local officials should have to decide first what infrastructure projects they want to complete, their cost, their priority, and have contracts already let contingent on receiving Federal dollars before Congress contemplates an infrastructure bill that would send taxpayer money to any of those States.

Those are critical first steps in getting to shovel-ready jobs to which to commit funds.

In Which I Disagree

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There is a bipartisan bill afoot that would cut all taxpayer-based funding for any gain-of-function research into any virus or bacterium for at least next five years.

I disagree.

As the Wuhan Virus, which the People’s Republic of China government released onto the world (whether by design or by incompetent lab carelessness) demonstrates, we need, desperately, to understand such plussed up biologics, whether they’ve been…enhanced…for politico-military use, as our enemies are surely researching, or they’ve naturally jumped from their animal origins to human infectiousness.

That requires gain-of-function research because that’s the only way we’ll be able quickly to understand and then to respond to a new disease. We just need to do the research entirely domestically rather than relying on, or paying, our enemies to do the research for us.