Category Archives: republicans
Stand with Rand
Rand Paul’s filibuster over all the president’s drones was a huge hash tag hit on Twitter. While Senator Paul talked himself blue in the face (with the help of Ted Cruz, MikeLee, Marco Rubio and others), old guard red state Republicans dined with the president. They were not happy with the kids’ behavior while they were out.
Senate Budget
The 1974 Budget Act requires both houses to pass a budget every year. The senate is four years in arrears.
House Republicans hatched a plan on Friday to raise the debt ceiling, but only if each chamber passes a budget. If senators don’t pass a budget, they don’t get paid.
This sounds suspiciously similar to Charles Krauthammer’s Friday pitch in his Washington Post column, though he didn’t mention the pay part.
Kimberley Strassel, in the WSJ, details how Harry Reid’s rope-a-dope tactics “hide the party’s spending ambitions” and “casts the Republicans as the cause of every legislative crises”.
Fiscal Sacrifice
The president came to Washington, demanded shared sacrifice, got his fiscal cliff deal and returned to Hawaii. According to Bloomberg taxes will go up for 77.1 percent of American families. The Congressional Budget Office says the deal will cost $4 trillion over the next decade. Spending cuts? … Maybe later. Kevin O’brien has a nice rant about that here.
Budget Baseline Camp
Uncle Sam’s starting point for spending is a baseline of the previous year CBO projections for the coming year.
“The most absurd current example is Mr. Obama’s claim that his “$4 trillion” plan reduces the deficit by about $800 billion over 10 years by ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But those “savings,” as he calls them, are measured against a White House budget office spending baseline that is fictional. Those wars are already being unwound and everyone knows the money will never be spent. But they are called “savings” to gull the public and make the deficit reduction add up to a large-sounding $4 trillion.”
