Kicking The Debt Can Down The Road To 2024

Another year, another punt in dealing with America’s ever-mounting debt problems.

After intense negotiations between U.S. Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA-20) and President Joe Biden, an agreement was struck which passed the House with both bipartisan support and bipartisan opposition.

The so-called “Fiscal Responsibility Act” (FRA) passed the House Wednesday in a 314 to 117 vote, with 71 Republicans joining 46 Democrats in the minority voting against the measure.

The deal will suspend the nation’s debt ceiling until after the 2024 presidential elections, leaving it up to the next White House and Congress to navigate a deal that addresses the ever-expanding national debt.

With the debt nearing $32 trillion, the congressional budget analysis estimates it will grow by around $4 trillion during the period the FRA is in place, or until early 2025.

Congressman August Pfluger (R-TX-11) was one of the members who voted in favor of the bill but acknowledged in a phone interview that the bill was far from perfect and isn’t to be considered a home run by fiscal conservatives.

Pfluger explained there were some major wins in the negotiations that caused him to vote yes.

“The number one thing we took away from holding the Energy Committee meetings in Midland was calls from the oil and gas industry to reform the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and I’m proud to say we got the most significant reforms to NEPA in 50 years as part of this deal, and Biden isn’t happy about it,” he said.

Pfluger explained how under NEPA laws, oil and gas permitting and regulations can slow industry projects down, taking almost 10 years in some cases to get federal permitting. He also said the deal would greenlight important pipeline projects.

In addition, Plfuger said he supported the welfare reforms, requiring 80 hours per month of work or job training from The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF) recipients, and clawing back of IRS funding, and while the proposal didn’t cut as much spending as he would like to see, it was still a small step in the right direction.

Here is where the usual blogging protocol would be to put in my analysis of the good and bad points of the deal. Nah, it stinks, because it doesn’t treat the looming national debt crisis seriously. We need a republican House, a Republican Senate, and a president who is willing to ride herd and veto non-balanced budgets to start fixing the problem, and we haven’t had that combination in my lifetime. Gerald R. Ford was the last Republican President who really fought to balance the budget, and republican congressional leadership hasn’t done so since the days of New Gingrich, Phil Gramm and Dick Armey.

Democrats will always vote for higher deficits because their entire business model is predicated on raking off the graft and doing the bidding of elites who prosper from asset inflation. Republicans as a whole always cave to them because no one holds them in line and because every debt limit hike is always an emergency rushed into law at the 11th hour when nobody is paying attention and they can whine “But we had to!”

Real austerity is limiting government outlays to receipts, and we haven’t had that since Gingrich and company held the line and the Dotcom boom brought in then record revenue in the late 1990s. Undoing Gramm-Rudmam-Lotta was disasterous.

I’d like to think that DeSantis could hold the line on deficit spending if he gets in. Sadly, we know from experience that Trump (whatever his other strengths) won’t…

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6 Responses to “Kicking The Debt Can Down The Road To 2024”

  1. Andy Markcyst says:

    The national debt will never be paid back. They don’t plan on paying it back. It is impossible that that number will shrink by even half. As we have just seen, it will get even bigger. To them it’s just a number, and they don’t care how big it gets. Everyone is complaining about their mispending our money. They’re not misspending our money…our money is long spent. Has been since Bretton Woods in the 70s. None of the money they are spending even exists. It’s all Floyd Christmas IOU funny-money.

    We are going to ride this excrement-sandwiched emmefer until the US loses a major peer conflict, the world truly dedollarizes, or something equally cataclysmic happens and then it’s going to be every man for himself. When you see hordes of American transgendered Marines and Army La Raza recruits getting massacred by PRC missile-spam on some beach in the Spratlys in 20 years – maybe sooner – you’ll know the jig is up.

    Here’s hoping you have an Austrian passport (the best).

  2. JackWayne says:

    It’s time to retire the dishonesty that Newt balanced the budget. He balanced the budget but not the off-budget resulting in an increase in the debt every year that was “balanced”. If it’s a politician and his lips are moving, he’s a liar.

  3. Etaoin Shrdlu says:

    I do not see elected politicians as having the cojones to materially cut spending.
    I jus t don’t see a rational basis for such a belief. Faith in God, yes. Politicians, no.

    This needs an Article 5. Convention of the States with an open agenda to address, by constitutional amendments limiting entitlement spending, and such obscenities as earmarks. Only by that means can “the people, or the states respectively” rein in vote-buying scams and spending over the revenues that (strictly limited by other amendments!) taxation would provide. “you have this much revenue, well, that’s how much government you can have.”

    People (and even more so, establishment politicos) fear an open Convention. Any amendments would still have to be ratified by a big majority of the states.

  4. Obama's boyfriend says:

    If you spend a dollar every second it will take 36,700 years to spend a trillion dollars. We will never pay back this debt, ergo the goverment will either default as all governments do or inflate as most do.15 years ago Venezuelans with 4 million Bolivars had a million dollars. Today you can’t buy a cup of coffee. 15 years ago four rubles were worth a dollar, today a ruble is worth a cent. I won’t mention what Zimbawe. Weimar Germany, or Iraq have done, or ask Mexico how many times they have devalued the peso.

    Our politicians are happy to destroy the currency. When the income tax started it only applied to those earning over 4,000 annually. Today that’s a joke. By the way why do you think the tax laws equal 12 volumes of the King James Bible, so that the tax payer benefits? Why do you think Obama and Pelosi pays at rates probably less than you do?

  5. Rollory says:

    Glad to see someone pointing out that the Clinton-era budgets were NOT balanced. My AP government teacher walked us through this at the time it was going on. They did a series of short-term loans from the Social Security fund into the general fund, and in the accounting they listed the money coming in on the positive side without listing the obligation that it would have to be (and was) paid back. There was NO surplus. It never existed. It was a myth created by journalists in service to Clinton. Everybody who keeps repeating the surplus claim is lying.

    As for outcomes: the USA is not going to lose a major peer conflict. There ARE no major peers and no prospect of any in the next century or two. China is already missing its window to make its move, it’s not making its move because it’s not ready and would lose (at BEST it would get a pyrrhic military victory and a compounding economic catastrophe), and if it doesn’t make its move now it’ll run out of people suddenly and painfully within a decade or two as everybody gets old and there are no kids to replace them. Russia is massacring young men it can’t replace while setting the stage for a political implosion. India is already looking at sub-replacement birthrates and doesn’t have the efficiency or quality standards of even China. Europe is a mix of collapsing birthrates and muslim immigration. The Islamic world has birthrates on a trend toward collapse (already there in places like Turkey and Iran), terminally disordered societies, and excessive dependence on foreign trade. Black Africa has decent birthrates but they’re dropping at the same speed as everywhere else, and black-run countries have yet to prove themselves capable of maintaining high-tech civilization and the corresponding agricultural production to feed their own – and the black african migration elsewhere is largely parasitical: they move to civilized countries because they “just want a better life” and can’t or won’t make their homelands be the place to have that. South/Central American governments are largely crony socialism while their birthrates are terrible and dropping and everyone who can is crossing the Rio Grande.

    Nobody, nowhere, is setting up to be a strong, energetic, efficient, dynamic, expansionist challenge to any existing order. It’s geriatric decay and decivilized chaos everywhere you look.

    Meanwhile, anybody who can move to the USA, does so. And the US government and military and taxation draw on that population, which while it probably isn’t up to the founders’ standards and likely won’t sustain things indefinitely, at least has the initiative to get up and do something to improve personal outcomes. The USA doesn’t have to be effective in any absolute sense. It just has to be the last halfway functional civilization still standing. That’s the way things are shaping up for the next few centuries.

    Or at least until the financial machinery REALLY breaks down, rather than just threatening to do so.

  6. Andy Markcyst says:

    “The USA doesn’t have to be effective in any absolute sense. It just has to be the last halfway functional civilization still standing. That’s the way things are shaping up for the next few centuries.”

    Very dystopian. Very “Children of Men” England still shines as a beacon symbolism with a dash of Soylent Green.

    We’ll just have to disagree about China. They have expansionist goals, they’re just not like our expansionist goals, so it’s not familiar in the Western ‘pivot if history’ internecine civilizational warfare sense that we’re used to where English-speaking civilization is always attempting to referee a ‘balance of power’ between nation-states.

    Absolutely nailed it on Clinton’s balanced budget though. Clown Show. It’s shameful to think that the last time we slayed America’s financial problems was under dimocrat Andrew Jackson. Dims were different then…

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