The spending bill, the debt, and the screaming need for grownups inside the Beltway

The bill is garbage:

It is a bad deal because it hikes domestic spending. It is a bad deal, as well, because it may end the chance for a conservative legislative achievement in 2018.

A two-year spending deal means Republicans probably won’t go to the trouble of passing a formal budget for 2019. That would mean no chance for a so-called reconciliation process that could allow them to enact meaningful legislation with only 50 votes in the Senate. If Republicans accept this deal and then forgo the reconciliation process, they will have given up their chance to pass a law without Democratic support, and measures such as easing the Obamacare regulations that will contribute to higher premiums in the coming years or reforming welfare will stand no chance of making it through Congress. With this deal, Republicans are hurting the chance to add to their ledger of accomplishments prior to November.

Ted Cruz is right. The only two things worthwhile about it are strengthening the military and disaster relief - and the disaster relief should have been considered separately:

Cruz’s full statement:

After much consideration, I will reluctantly vote for this legislation. This bill contains major victories; if hurricane relief and restoring vital defense spending were the only elements of this bill, I would be supporting it energetically and enthusiastically. Unfortunately—in addition to funding those critical priorities—this bill also unnecessarily balloons the deficit.

Since Hurricane Harvey’s landfall in August, I have worked tirelessly with Senator Cornyn, Governor Abbott, the Texas congressional delegation, and dozens of local mayors, county judges, and police and fire chiefs up and down the coast to identify and meet the needs of impacted Texans, who in many cases lost everything. Today, we follow through on our promise to give Texans the next significant package of emergency assistance we need to recover and come back stronger than ever.

Prior to today, we had already secured more than $50 billion in emergency funding for storm victims in 2017, as well as passing the Cruz-Cornyn-Rubio legislation that provided more than $5.5 billion in targeted tax relief to those who suffered from the devastation of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria. The additional funding provided by today’s legislation is an important next step in our state’s road to recovery, and I am grateful that we have been able to build upon and improve the bill that was sent to us by the House of Representatives so that we can continue to give the State of Texas the resources it desperately needs.

Specifically, I’m proud that Senator Cornyn and I were able to work with our colleagues to increase overall disaster relief from $81 billion to $89 billion; to significantly increase Texas’s share of that relief; to provide vital relief to cotton farmers devastated by Harvey; and to significantly increase the funding for critical Army Corps flood management projects that will help the State mitigate against future flooding events, such as potentially beginning construction on the Sabine Pass to Galveston Bay coastal barrier or building a third reservoir in the Houston area.

Additionally, I have also fought hard for many years to fully fund our military and fulfill our constitutional duty to provide for the common defense, and I am very pleased that this legislation will do just that. The world is a dangerous place—and getting more dangerous each and every day—and we have too long allowed our military to weaken and our readiness to be undermined. This agreement turns that around, increasing military funding by $165 billion. That will make America much, much safer. It honors the commitment we owe our soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and coast guardsmen, and it enables them to far better protect our great nation.

Meaningful hurricane relief and rebuilding our military both represent major victories for Texans, and I am grateful we were able to get them accomplished.

Unfortunately, the Democrats and the Washington establishment tied these critical measures to legislation that busts the non-defense budget cap by over $130 billion and irresponsibly suspends the debt limit to allow unfettered spending for yet another year. This is wrong. It is cynical. And it’s a bad deal for American taxpayers.

Disaster relief in particular should have been considered separately and independently, as I’ve advocated from the very beginning, to avoid this very situation of hurricane victims being held hostage for the sake of unrelated political battles.

Washington logrolling sometimes forces lousy choices. This is one of those choices. I will vote yes on this bill because Texas desperately needs disaster relief and because the decade-long weakening of our military readiness has now reached crisis levels. But I do so with deep reservations.

This bill will increase our deficits and increase our debt. That’s foolhardy. Instead of increasing non-defense discretionary spending, we should be reining in government spending. Eliminating unnecessary government programs. We should be showing the courage to finally reform long-term entitlement spending, which drives two-thirds of our spiraling debt. And we should be passing structural reform, like a federal Balanced Budget Amendment and Term Limits Amendment. And I am committed to continuing to fight to deliver on each of those promises.

And, in this age when everything becomes a political football and / or a line in the sand, the ever-looming debt and deficit are banners to be carried by the various tribes vying for the privilege of ruling over us. Dems say, "I thought Republicans were the party of concern about the debt," and Trump tribalists don't want to talk about it much. Rush Limbaugh actually trotted out an "it-hasn't-impeded-our-overall-standard-of-living" argument.

Knock it off, knuckleheads. It's a crisis that will have its full impact sooner rather than later:

 . . . the Social Security system has been paying out more than it takes in every year since 2010 and these annual deficits have totaled over $600 billion. This means that benefits are currently being subsidized by taxpayers through the payment of IOUs that the rest of the U.S. government built up by raiding the Social Security trust fund to pay for decades of extravagant federal spending. As to that date Bush referred to way out in the future, when the trust fund becomes completely depleted, leading to automatic benefit cuts. It has since moved up eight years to 2034.

Put another way, in 2018 we are now just 16 years away from the day of reckoning that was going to be 37 years away when Bush warned about it. Yet when it came time for President Trump to deliver the 2018 State of the Union address, he made no mention of Social Security, or Medicare, or Medicaid — three programs that currently cost over $2 trillion, accounting for more than half of the federal budget. Instead, he touted paid family leave and proposed $1.5 trillion in new infrastructure spending.

Absent action, spending on the big three entitlements is only going to explode in the coming decades as the retired population increases and healthcare costs rise. This is expected to drive debt to dangerous and unsustainable levels.

And here's what you get when you elect a charlatan with no core principles, certainly not an understanding of what needs to be done about the debt:

in 2016, Trump tore through the Republican primary field on a populist message that rejected limited government orthodoxy. In his campaign, Trump promoted a conservatism more of attitude than ideology, and he spoke openly of keeping federal entitlements largely untouched.

 This may help with the kind of bracing perspective we'd better have:

 . . . pretty soon, the national debt held by outside investors will exceed the value of all the goods and services produced in the U.S. in an entire year.

This is shameful and embarrassing.

Would primarying any of these clowns do any good? We already do a fair amount of that, enough to see that, once inside the Beltway, the new-bloods either buckle or come off looking like twigs swept away in a flood.

I have no regrets about no longer being a member of the squandered-opportunity party.