Dave Brat, the Virginia Republican who unseated House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the primary, and a prominent member of the Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives, summed up the new budget soon to be voted on by the entire House.
“The end product here is just cleaning the barn; it’s a disaster. We’re breaking our pledge on the budget caps to the American people, we’ve lost fiscal discipline, and we’re throwing it all on the next generation,” declared Brat, a member of the House Budget Committee.
Several Republican presidential candidates have made the rising national debt a major issue of their campaigns. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky calls the $18-trillion debt the “greatest threat” to the future of the country, while Senator Marco Rubio predicts the debt will “shackle future generations.”
However, the latest budget deal — the first under the leadership of House Speaker Paul Ryan, will add billions to that debt.
And the House gets just two days to review it.
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The new budget involves $1.1 trillion in spending and $680 billion in tax breaks. It not only vastly increases federal spending, but also represents yet another victory over the Republicans for the White House and Obama’s Democratic allies.
For example, Obama was able to win on climate change funding. This past summer, a bill would have blocked any funding for the Green Climate Fund (GCF). This fund’s purpose is to provide help to poorer nations in their efforts to implement the agenda of those who want to scale back certain economic activity, which they say will fight “global climate change.”
This bill, however, while not explicitly funding the GCF, does not actually block it either. In other words, Obama will be able to use money from current “discretionary funding” to make American contributions to the GCF. Press Secretary Josh Earnest was pleased at the budget proposal in this regard, telling reporters, “Based on what we have reviewed so far, there are no restrictions on our ability to make good on the president’s pledge to contribute to the Green Climate Fund.”
Karen Orenstein, a senior analyst with Friends of the Earth, added, “This is a rebuke to those congressional extremists who tried to play politics with desperately needed money to help the world’s poor take climate action. Morality and reason, rather than science-denying isolationism, prevailed in this case.”
The number of visas made available for foreign workers will also increase with the Ryan budget — another victory for Obama and the Democrats. Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, perhaps the number-one opponent in Congress of the president’s pro-immigration policies, took to the floor of the Senate to express his outrage:
The GOP-led Congress is about to deliver Obama a four-fold increase to one of the most controversial foreign worker programs. The result? Higher unemployment and lower wages for Americans.
Sessions was referencing the number of H-2B visas, which will expand from 66,000 to 250,000, due to the Ryan budget language.
Yet, provisions to defund “sanctuary cities” (which provide sanctuary to illegal aliens in violation of federal immigration law) were stripped from the bill, Sessions noted, and the Ryan budget will continue to provide funding to those cities. The proposal to prevent illegal aliens from receiving tax credits for children not even in the country was also taken out of the budget.
Planned Parenthood — despite the fact that it takes the lives of 330,000 unborn babies every year, and has now been exposed selling aborted baby parts — is fully funded in the Ryan budget. Additionally, neither the effort to restrict Syrian and Iraqi refugee resettlement, nor the attempt to stop Obama from taking unilateral executive action on immigration, was in the final draft.
Tax breaks for special-interest groups, who have the lobbyists to make such things happen, will also add to the rising national debt. Others getting a break? The film and TV industries, rum producers in the Caribbean, racehorse owners, and those who have a two-wheeled plug-in electric car..
However, the average American who works in a factory, or who owns a small business or is employed in one — lacking a high-powered lobbyist in D.C. — can expect to continue to bear the burden of government spending and tax policies, designed to benefit the well-connected.
President Andrew Jackson alluded to this issue in his historic veto message, when he struck down the recharter bill for the Second Bank of the United States in 1832. He declared,
It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes…. When the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinction, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges … the humble members of society — the farmer, mechanics, and laborers — who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their government.
So it continues, whether Congress is controlled by Democrats or Republicans. Those who have connections are the recipients of federal spending and favorable changes in the laws. For example, Republican leadership may not have cared enough about aborted babies to fight for defunding Planned Parenthood, or American workers displaced by foreign workers and environmental extremism, but Ryan made sure a provision was added to the bill to allow the sale of American oil to foreigners. While this is intrinsically a good policy, it vividly illustrates the truth of Andrew Jackson’s remarks in his bank veto message.
As radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh asked in commenting on the budget bill, “Why do we even have a Republican Party?”
Photo of Rep. Paul Ryan: AP Images
Steve Byas is a professor of history at Hillsdale Free Will Baptist College in Moore, Oklahoma. His book, History’s Greatest Libels, is a challenge to some of the great lies of history.
