Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee
North Carolina Yankee
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Atlas Institution
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« on: May 05, 2018, 09:01:14 PM » |
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Earlier today, the BPC passed unanimously its draft of the budget. The next step in this process is for it to be presented to Congress for an up or down vote.
The other day I stated one thing that the BPC was not designed to do, and that was speed up the traditional process. It was meant to get us to a place where subsequent debates about the budget were concrete and firmly grounded on an accepted reality, whatever the cost, though timely completion would have been preferably obviously.
This gets me to the second point of what the BPC was not tasked to do. It was not tasked to fix our budgetary woes, nor address Congress's mistakes in spending us into deficit. Its job was to compile what congress has done, merge that with GM estimates and produce a budget reflecting what Congress has already done.
The bills appropriating this money, the programs automatically spending this money and the tax levels producing these revenues are the result of a series of bills passed by Congress post reset and also those predating the reset from RL.
I understand the temptation here, the desire to express dissatisfaction with this state of affairs and this level of deficits is to vote no.
No one shares this dissatisfaction more than I do. But knowing that only doubles my belief in the necessity of what has to come next. Passing the budget resolution produced by the BPC is not an endorsement of irresponsibility, is the first step towards being responsible with our money. Congress is not voting to produce this deficit, it already did that. Congress is voting to acknowledge what it has caused and at the same time provide the basis for having a sound, reasonable by numbers debate on how to fix it.
It will be far easier from the game play perspective to have this debate in the context of an existing budget passed into law, and thus have the ability to debate the next budget without continuing to preserve by now 22 month long plane of nothingness with no budget, no budget resolution and little idea of what has to come next.
It had been my desire when this process was first started, if the dates in the law had been met, for the budget resolution produced by the committee to pass the up or down vote and then proceed with amendments to such. However, that was possible in October, it is not practical or reasonable to do that now with just five months left, and especially if it distracts from and delays the composition of the next budget which by law we should be debating right now anyway and has to be signed by Oct 1st.
If you truly do want to get us on the road to fiscal sanity, that road starts by acknowledging what already exists and passing the committees report. To do otherwise would be to risk going another whole fiscal year without a budget.
For the love of Dave, pass it so we can bring up the FY2019 budget and actually debate how to fix this mess.
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