The GOP Congress’ “Spendthrift Conservatism”
Remember a conservatism that included the principles of balanced budgets and spending cuts? No longer. The new conservatism in vogue inside the Washington, D.C., beltway is “spendthrift conservatism,” which can be defined as claiming to be cutting spending and paying off the national debt while at the same time increasing both.
The GOP House struggled against the Democratic Senate and President during the first half of April, but this latest bout was as phony as a professional wrestling match. The bad acting included House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) April 8 joint statement on the budget deal for fiscal 2011 spending:
We have agreed to an historic amount of cuts for the remainder of this fiscal year, as well as a short-term bridge that will give us time to avoid a shutdown while we get that agreement through both houses and to the President. We will cut $78.5 billion below the President’s 2011 budget proposal.
It sounded like a big spending cut, but it was only $38.5 billion less than the “stimulus”-bloated fiscal 2010 budget. And then the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that about half of the $38.5 billion would never have been spent anyway; the funds were leftovers that agencies admitted they didn’t need. And nearly all of the remaining “cuts” were for future fiscal years; only $352 million of the cuts was for fiscal 2011.
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