By Don Schmitz
Continuing resolutions (CR), are our continuing nightmare. “Stopgap” funding it’s called. As opposed to fulfilling its Constitutional responsibility to collect taxes and pay our debts by passing a budget for the fiscal year, Congress repeatedly raises the debt ceiling and passes CRs for short-term fixes. In the 50 years since the passing of the 1974 Congressional Budget Act, they have only completed appropriations before the fiscal year deadline four times, the last time being 1997. Oct. 1 is the new federal fiscal year, but Congress hasn’t passed a budget, and their latest stopgap is in deep trouble. Of course it is.
Imagine the turmoil if you ran your business this way. You have a mortgage with an increasing interest rate, huge credit card bills, and half of the decision-makers want to spend more on purchases and vacations while you are running in the red every year. You can’t agree on the long-term fix for financial solvency at the end of the year, but to avoid foreclosure you agree on a spending plan for a couple of months (that old “stopgap” spending), promising everyone will hammer it out later.
Of course, a couple months later, things are worse, solutions are harder, compromise is fading, and those asserting no more spending beyond income are labeled unreasonable, causing unnecessary pain.
Welcome to the budget process in Washington, D.C. Every time they do this, which is almost every time, it’s a cobbled-together mess passed at the last minute with no long-term solution. The president is supposed to provide the budget on the first Monday of February, but Biden didn’t get it done until March 9. Congress is supposed to complete their joint resolution by April 15, inclusive of separate bills funding the federal agencies. They still haven’t done so. Not able to accomplish even that, Congress typically passes giant omnibus bills bundling appropriations bills into a huge CR, a full year of CRs, an easy way to avoid their responsibilities, and inconsistent with the 1974 law. It’s no wonder our budget process is broken, inflation has gutted Americans’ abilities to make ends meet, and our children are being saddled with a lifetime of unsustainable debt. Since 2007 the appropriation bills were sadly combined this way in all but two times.
All the fighting is over 27 percent of the budget, as 62 percent is mandatory for “entitlement” programs and 10 percent is for our ballooning debt interest. Discretionary spending was almost half the budget in 1977, but it is increasingly squeezed by entitlements and debt service, yet our dysfunctional Congress can’t sort out handling less than a third of the budget.
There have been five government shutdowns since 1995, lasting as long as 35 days in January 2019. Despite the apocalyptic predictions by the D.C. establishment that the economy will crash, and the world will end, the 2019 shutdown furloughed a mere 300,000 of the 2.1 million federal employees and trimmed the GDP by aimperceptible 0.02 percent according to the Pew Research Center.
The government was running out of money last June but averted a shutdown by another CR with a short lifespan, and now another shutdown is looming. That CR included some long-term commitments to reduce some of the deficit spending, but it was not by any means the required annual budget. Congress has failed to pass a budget, and another deadline looms, whereupon, predictably, the profligate spenders in D.C. want another CR. Fiscal conservatives are demanding more spending cuts to address the insane deficits and debt, while their opponents are crying foul and labeling them “right-wing extremists”. Wait a minute, wasn’t the CR in June supposed to be a “stopgap” to get us to the budget deadline?
There is still no budget passed by Congress awaiting the president’s signature, but the same cadre of incompetents are squealing because some are resisting slapping down the credit card again to subsidize their dysfunction. Congress has utterly failed to pass any of the 12 regular spending bills for this fiscal year starting next week.
Understand this: the U.S. federal debt is now $33 TRILLION, 123 percent of the GDP, and they ran up another $1.5 trillion in deficit spending this year. The Biden budget would increase the debt to $50.7 trillion by 2033. Deficit spending will increase the debt to 225 percent of GDP by 2050, whereupon paying interest will be the single largest expense in the federal budget. Our children will be paying the interest on our bills and have nothing left for themselves. We don’t have a revenue problem; we have a spending problem. In 2011, U.S. tax revenue was 14.27 percent of GDP, now it’s at 19 percent, as they collect more taxes than ever. Stop the CRs, pass a balanced budget, and stop the madness. That’s not radical, it’s responsible.