Budget deal thoughts

The dog-bites-man story would have been if Trump and congressional Republicans had actually demonstrated some spine and insisted on an abrupt shift in course.

You know, like looking squarely at the obvious reason we have a $23 trillion debt and insisting that the hemorrhaging stops here.

Instead, Trump tweets about a "real compromise" that preserved what he wanted out of it for "our great Military and Vets!"

It's not a great victory for anybody, because his particular win and those perceived to be so by Pelosi and Schumer are "funded" by a hollowed-out federal Treasury. Sure, at this moment, one can find a sum of money in it, but a near-future in which there is none except for interest payments while Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid recipients insist on benefits that can no longer be provided - and Constitutionally specified government functions such as seeing to the nation's security are left to wither - breathes down the nation's neck.

And your tax dollars still pay for your fellow citizens to have holes popped in their skulls and their brains vacuumed out.

And the market price of a bushel of a given farm crop remains hopelessly distorted due to government's presence in what ought to be an agreement solely between buyer and seller.

Budget caps, hailed at their introduction as such a stellar idea, quickly fell to government's insatiable appetite:

The 2011 budget caps, remember, were part of the Republicans’ deal with President Obama, which they secured in exchange for letting some of President Bush’s tax cuts expire. To give the caps teeth, the deal included a sequester provision that imposed automatic, across-the-board spending cuts if Congress couldn’t figure out how to live within its means.

For a time, those spending caps actually worked.

Overall, federal outlays declined for three years straight after that agreement, when you adjust for inflation. As a share of GDP, spending shrank from 23.4% down to 20.2%. Lo and behold, the world didn’t come to an end.

Since then, however, Congress lost interest in spending restraint, and the floodgates reopened. Despite the technical existence of spending caps, outlays have shot up 19% in real terms since 2014. Spending is up nearly 9% in just the past two years alone. As a share of GDP, federal expenditures have crept back up to 21.3%.

And lefties have nothing to offer in this conversation. That is to say, their instinctual response is to call the 2017 tax cut irresponsible.

It is never irresponsible to let people keep what is theirs.  

Along with that supremely important moral point, it's important to reiterate the fact that government could take every last penny of the assets of everyone above millionaire status and it wouldn't stave off what we're facing.  It could take all the assets of everyone in the US and the prospect would still loom.

No, this is about the basic folly of enlisting American government to perform functions for which it was not designed. The two great givens of the human condition - sickness and old age - should be addressed by individuals and private associations of individuals. Over the course of the last century, an entirely different view of what government is for took root.

This says much about our collective lack of maturity. Real disaster becomes more probable every day, but the short-term gratification of "wins" for one's tribe are so powerful as to make even those who used to give lip service to a serious worldview quite willingly chose to be oblivious.

It is so very late in the day.