Posted by Tina
Did you notice heaps of criticism piled on the Republican Party after the Ryan-Murray budget bill passed in the House? Has anyone since talked about the compromises Democrats had to make to pass this legislation? Has anyone targeted their leadership or questioned their principles and standards? Not that you’d notice! And there’s nothing unusual about that, it happens all of the time. But maybe that’s part of the problem. It has become blood sport to focus only on Republican compromise…on Republicans “caving”…to the point where we set our party up to be the battered wife in the relationship. Maybe we are so busy being disgusted and defending our positions that we fail to notice when we have won significant ground. The left brought us down the road of big government dependency using baby steps. They made compromises to take a small bit of ground time and time again. Republicans, including the conservatives in the party, should take a second look at this budget and consider what we won, stop the infighting, and prepare for the next round. To that end I want to share an article that could have you scratching your head and taking a second look.
“Two and a Half Cheers for Ryan-Murray,” by Peter Ferrara, a man I have come to deeply respect and whose goal is to cut the federal government in half, is featured in The American Spectator:
…The deal involves an exact compromise between the federal discretionary spending totals proposed in Ryan’s 2014 Republican budget ($967 billion) passed by the House and Murray’s 2014 Democrat budget ($1.058 trillion) passed by the Senate earlier this year, setting federal discretionary spending for 2014 at $1.12 trillion. That result was effectively set by how your friends, neighbors, and fellow Americans voted last year. So calling that “A Huge Republican Cave-In” is not accurate.
True it breaks the sequester spending cap for 2014 by $45 billion. That is bad and sad, because the sequester spending caps actually reduced total federal spending in actual nominal dollars for both 2012 and 2013, which seems to have already boosted economic growth. That was the first reduction in actual total federal spending for two years since the end of the Korean War under President Eisenhower. But that $45 billion represents an increase in total federal spending for 2014 compared to current law of 1.2%, which is all that Ryan and the Republicans conceded in the budget deal for 2014. Hardly a huge Republican cave-in.
Highly principled and always numerically accurate Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute asks, “Why would Republican leaders agree to that?” The best answer would be because that reflects how the American people, or at least those who showed up at the polls (note), voted last year, and that is who Congressional Republican leaders work for.
The budget deal also breaks the sequester spending cap for 2015 by $18 billion, a rounding error in today’s federal spending, for a total of $63 billion in increased spending over current law for both 2014 and 2015. That represents an increase of 0.9% in total federal spending under current law for both years combined, which is all the increased spending that Ryan and the Republicans conceded in the entire budget deal. Not really a huge Republican cave in. In fact, 70% of the sequester remains in place even for 2014 and 2015 when the sequester caps were broken.
This information is a lot different that the sound bites that did nothing but damage the Republican Party and its supporters, including the Tea Party that also chimed in, shooting ourselves in the foot as we always do. (That’s what makes us dumb) But this information isn’t all that Mr. Ferrara conveyed in his article.
Democrats wanted much more in this budget deal than they were granted. It had to gall them, for instance that half of the spending increase will go for defense. The fact that the sequester spending caps, according to Mr. Ferrara, “remain in effect unchanged for 2016 (at $1.016 trillion in total federal discretionary spending for that year) and beyond” can’t make them happy either. Ryan also won some entitlement reform and spending decreases to offset some of the spending increases and they go into effect now, not at some future unspecified date. They include: 1. Reducing the COLA increases for early military retirees only before age 62, 2. Requiring all new federal employees to contribute more toward their own retirement benefits, 3. Requiring companies to finance more of the costs of the federal guarantees of their own pensions, 4. Freeing more federally controlled areas for oil and gas exploration and production, generating more oil and gas royalties, 5. Provisions to reduce federal overpayments, and improve federal collections, 6. Extending new sequester spending caps to 2022 and 2023, saving another $22 billion.
Mr. Ferrara quotes Americans for Tax Reform: “Over the long term budget horizon, [the Ryan-Murray budget deal] is a large net spending cut…. the spending cuts included in the plan are permanent and mandatory. It would take an act of Congress to amend them.”
Tea Party members and conservative supporters would be wise to read the rest of this article. You will discover a big picture view of the entire theater of battle we face in the coming years with a few ideas about whats next.
Take that second look and then let the scrapping begin, if we must!
