The GOP Budget Deal Throws Fiscal Sanity Out The Overton Window President Trump signed a deal to avert a government shutdown for another two years by basically giving the Democrats all the spending they wanted.
By Robert Tracinski
February 9, 2018 They told me if I didn’t vote for Donald Trump, Washington DC would go on a massive, unsustainable, Big Government spending spree — and they were right!
Early this morning, Congress passed and President Trump signed a deal to avert a government shutdown for another two years by basically giving the Democrats all the spending they wanted and increasing discretionary spending by $150 billion a year.
There are also reports that Republicans are working on a bill to bail out Obamacare, and we haven’t even gotten to Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan yet. But no big deal. Rush Limbaugh says he isn’t worrying about the debt because “all of the apocalyptic warnings I grew up hearing have yet to happen.â€
Limbaugh knows full well why the budget apocalypse hasn’t happened yet. In the 1990s a Republican Congress restrained spending just enough so that a growing economy could outpace growing government. More recently, the budget showdowns of the Tea Party era led to a “sequester†that also restrained spending. In other words, we have staved off disaster by doing the exact opposite of what Republicans just did. As to why Limbaugh is fine with the new direction — well, he’s not the only public figure who has made a career as a bold, politically incorrect truth-teller while actually telling his audience whatever they want to hear at the moment. That turns out to be pretty much the same explanation for why Republicans just passed this deal.
I knew we were doomed when Republican lawmakers and a lot of my conservative friends got really excited about an idea to add a new government benefit — paid family leave — to Social Security. It was not just a reluctant acceptance of the giant middle class entitlement state. It was an attempt to embrace that system and show that they, too, could shower goodies onto the American public, just in a more fiscally responsible way.
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http://thefederalist.com/2018/02/09/the-gop-budget-deal-throws-fiscal-sanity-out-the-overton-window/