With Inflation At Its Highest In Decades, Congress Works To Shovel Trillions More Out The Door In A Craptastic ‘Omnibus’
By: Christopher Jacobs
March 10, 2022
Congress should use the omnibus to vacuum up its unnecessary spending, to control both our national debt and runaway inflation. Yeah, right.
News flash from Washington: Congress is rushing to pass a bill it hasn’t read, full of earmarks and special favors for campaign donors. Where have we heard that before?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uC4bXmcUvw&ab_channel=HouseRepublicansThe House introduced the omnibus bill after midnight Tuesday, and it’s a whopping 2,741 pages. A combination of poor planning, Democratic delusions, and an upcoming vacation (seriously!) have Congress rushing to ram through a bill totaling thousands of pages, and trillions of dollars, in a matter of hours. Again.
Stop Overspending
Based on leaked press reports, the legislation has some prominent provisions. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, said the bill would include about $14 billion in humanitarian and military assistance for Ukraine. Another $15 billion would go towards purchasing additional Covid tests and treatments, in the hopes of staving off any new variants of the disease that may emerge in the coming months. Previous rounds of Covid spending and equipment still haven’t been used.
Reports also note the bill is a veritable spending spree of pork for special interests, with more than 4,000 earmarks. If Democrats in Congress and the Biden administration think we should add this new spending to our $30 trillion (and rising) national debt, they’re not trying hard enough to find economies.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the budget-busting bill Democrats rammed through last March in the name of “Covid relief” would spend out $528.5 billion in the fiscal year ending this September 30, and another $114.3 billion in the fiscal year starting October 1. That’s a total of $642.8 billion in the next two years alone that Congress could re-purpose—much of it in the form of bailout funds to states and localities (read: government employee unions) that are already flush with cash.
Congress should use the omnibus to vacuum up some of this unnecessary spending, to control both our national debt and runaway inflation. But instead, lawmakers will likely engage in the time-honored Washington tradition of log-rolling, whereby Republicans agree to vote for Democrats’ wasteful spending priorities in exchange for Democrats voting for Republican initiatives.
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https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/10/with-inflation-at-its-highest-in-decades-congress-works-to-shovel-trillions-more-out-the-door-in-a-craptastic-omnibus/