House Republican negotiators and the Biden administration hashed out a deal to raise the debt ceiling for two years in exchange for exceedingly modest amounts of spending restraint on a sliver of the overall federal budget.
The headline items in the agreement, according The Wall Street Journal, include:
The deal holds nonmilitary spending roughly flat for the 2024 fiscal year from this year, after factoring in some appropriations adjustments. The deal sets a 1% cap on spending increases for the 2025 fiscal year. House Republicans portrayed the 2023 spending level as a rollback to fiscal 2022 levels.
The deal also includes a provision that forces a 1% cut in government spending if all 12 appropriations bills aren’t passed by the end of this year.
Military spending in fiscal 2024 would be roughly at the level of Biden’s fiscal 2024 budget request, a 3% increase to $886 billion, according to an outline of the deal and talking points that were disseminated by the White House to Democratic lawmakers. There will be $121 billion for veterans programs. The deal calls for $637 billion for other nondefense programs, which the White House described as about flat with current 2023 levels, once appropriations adjustments are made.
There’s more at the link, but the general sentiment is these are the sorts of items the GOP could have gotten through the normal budget process. Meaning: there was no need, at all, to drag the debt ceiling let alone the possibility of a default into this.
The politics of the deal will unfold rapidly over the next few days, The burn it all down crowd on the populist right is displeased with the deal, and threatens to sit on its hands. The can’t cut a dime or the apocalypse will come crowd on the left is in a snit, too. Usually, such carping from the wings is the sign of a successful compromise.
But are the votes there from the rest of the House and Senate – from members who aren’t LARPing their way through public service – to get is passed before Uncle Sam runs out of money?
We shall see. The sensible course would be to approve it and regroup to fight over the nitty-gritty inside the federal budget. That requires a lot of time and some very hard work. A tall order for some members. A task worth accepting for the rest.
And that’s largely because for all the tough talk about the deal reached over the long weekend, it refused to engage, let alone mention, the largest items driving federal spending: Social Security and Medicare.
As the Manhattan Institute’s Brian Riedl noted:
Ultimately, if Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are not addressed, everything else will be squeezed out – much deeper cuts elsewhere – and it still will not be enough to avoid shock-and-awe middle class tax hikes.
Bottom line: the deal is a mole hill made out of a mountain. Unless the big challenges with entitlement spending are fully and frankly addressed, everything else is just hand waving.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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Since social security and medicare are paid throughout a person’s working years, why do members of our government keep calling them entitlements? Now welfare, that’s an entitlement, along with all other such payments that people get payed for doing nothing.
This is a major bone of contention for me, too. Don’t forcibly take money out of my paychecks for YEARS, tell me to trust you with it blindly, then tell me that I either have to wait longer to start drawing on it, or forfeit some of it.
Think about the word itself instead of the meaning it has become. You are in fact ENTITLED to recive the bought and paid for benefits from SS and Medicare. No one is entitled to welfare, that is a gift from your fellow citizens
This was the Memorial Day weekend massacre, on we the people. Typical
Have them remove non-citizens from Medicaid and Social Security first before cuts. They haven’t paid into it and never will. I DID and everyone else who works for a living. It is NOT an “entitlement”, I paid into it every damned week seeing it taken out of my pay check. Get these leeches off those programs and it will be solvent. Or give me my money back now.
So now, the House Conservatives are in the middle of a rules committee hearing marathon trying to unpack this fiddle faddle caused by Kevin McCarthy’s Memorial Day weekend meltdown of the debt ceiling agreement in principle. They already raised the debt ceiling with the save, limit and grow act, that is just sitting gathering moss, in the US Senate. Meanwhile, the Democrats are pretending that they got screwed, stomping their feet and jumping up & down when they were all in the plan. WETHEPEOLEGOTSCREWED!
Social Security could be saved much further into the future if they would raise the cut off for the rich who only pay for a small percentage on their huge profits.
To be fair, the cutoff means they will only get benefits based on what they paid in.
I don’t see a future for a government that keeps borrowing, borrowing, borrowing to stay afloat. Eventually there will be a day of reckoning and the polticians will not be able to hide from the people’s wrath.