Kicking a can is fun when you’re a kid
It’s disastrous when you’re in Congress
Unlike when we were kids idly sauntering down a street or dirt road, harmlessly kicking a can or rock along as we went, Congress kicks fiscal responsibility down the road, generating ever-increasing debt and deficit. This is what just happened with yet another Continuing Resolution being passed by the House.
There was a lot of discord on social media during the last week over Rep. Thomas Massie standing against the CR and President Trump maligning Massie a grandstander who should be primaried.
Massie’s concern, as he articulated it, was that the CR was nothing more than Biden-level spending, continuing funds for USAID (which DOGE has revealed should be defunded), and continuing to increase the national debt. Many on social media took to supporting Massie, and just as many Trump supporters took to castigating Massie and those who stood with him.
How many times have we heard it? “Trump is playing 18th-dimensional Rigellian Risk while everyone else is playing Terran Tiddlywinks!” “Anyone voting against the CR is blocking Trump’s plan and going against the will of the people!” Along with the likes of these, Trump supporters echoed the typical “trust the plan” mantra, a phrase that has been parroted prolifically even since Trump’s first term, despite the predicted results never coming to pass.
I prefer a more measured approach: trust but verify.
Yes, things are a bit different this time. Yes, Trump has DOGE and others in his cabinet running a disruptive shock and awe campaign against the status quo. Yes, Trump has learned a few things since his first time in office. But…
I am not blind to Trump’s shortcomings. There are things Trump still hasn’t learned, including who to trust. He has put his faith in Speaker Mike Johnson who has time and again revealed himself a uniparty deep-state hack. Despite amazing progress we see from the likes of Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel, Pam Bondi has accomplished nothing other than a multitude of appearances on Fox News. Trump still thinks Project Warp Speed was a superlative success. But, back to the CR…
Johnson has claimed on X that the CR that passed the House was “clean.” To be clear, the level of spending the bill sets for fiscal year 2025 is $5.5 trillion. To put that in perspective, if you calculate that out in dollars per second, that is one dollar every second for over 174,000 years! And they’re proud of themselves for this. This is what they call “clean.”
Take a look at their budget and deficit plans from the bill:
Would you call that “clean”? Running up another $20 trillion in debt over the next ten years?
Title II of the bill discusses reductions in deficit, but what does the Committee on Education and Workforce reducing the deficit by “not less than $330,000,000,000” for the ten year period really amount to in the face of a $20,000,000,000,000 dollar deficit increase?
Think about this - the bill outright shows a $20 trillion deficit increase over the next ten years, but they have a total target reduction of only $2 trillion (Title III, Sec. 3002, Subsection (a)). And guess what? If they do meet that reduction, then Title II, Sec. 3002, Subsec. (b) says they will increase the budget authority, outlays, and revenues.
The excuse I’ve heard from many is that the Republicans don’t have the votes in the Senate to pass a bill with cuts, so we need to wait until September. So, what will change between now and September? We won’t have any additional seats in the Senate, so what will the excuse be then?
What happened to “DOGE-ING the government”? What happened to cutting waste? Instead we get, “we have to increase spending before we can decrease spending”? Sounds like, “we have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it.”
At the end of last year, with the potato-in-chief still occupying the White House, we were told House Republicans couldn’t vote against the CR because it would shut down the government. Oh, just imagine the optics of the Republicans shutting down the government because they want to save the taxpayers money!!!
Had that happened, the organ of the state known as the “media” would have spun it hard to make House Republicans look like merciless monsters taking away the people’s entitlements (which anyone with a brain knows wouldn’t happen). So they passed the CR.
Now they’re passing a CR over which the Democrats are threatening to shut down the government. And, water bearers that they are, the media will spin that into a positive for the Democrats, saying the Republicans are merciless monsters taking away the people’s entitlements so they can give their billionaire buddies big breaks on their taxes.
It’s a lose-lose. So why not “lose” on the moral high ground?
I believe if the Democrats do sabotage the bill when it reaches the Senate, and the government shuts down, it’s actually a win, because it means the government won’t be passing more legislation that costs us more money. And for those who know, and those Democrats already struggling with their party, it will only paint the Democrat Party in a negative light regardless of media spin.
I won’t deny Trump was our best choice in November, but that doesn’t mean everything he does or says is right or perfect. Questioning authority, any authority, is healthy and often beneficial. While some may think Massie standing on principle was nothing but a show, if we don’t stand on principle regardless of outcome, then where do we really stand? It’s time to stop kicking the can and instead, pick it up, dispose of it, and get a new one.
Kick, kick, kick... we've had *decades* of kicking (my entire lifetime with maybe a bit of improvement with Reagan). This is exactly the continuing disaster that we voted AGAINST. Many voted for Trump only in a desperate hope that finally we would get a President with the courage and financial sense to go against popular opinion and actually address the problem with real cuts.
No waiting. No waiting for another election. That's a lame excuse. Veto that bill! Stop spending! Yes, it's going to hurt (some), but better a lot of hurt now than catastrophic hurt later.
My head hurts, so I'm going to make this simple. We've all heard the term "big tent." I'm not talking about the Christian band from the 90's or Barnum and Bailey. In politics, the generic term loosely means inviting as many people as you can into your sphere of political influence while claiming to give them a voice. In reality, what it means simply is making room in the tent to spend more taxpayer dollars for more people through promises of some pipe-dream that will magically balance itself "somewhere down the road." In other words growing the bureaucratic state even more to accommodate your new converts with promises made, to go along with the back room deals to maintain said party's slice of the political power-scape.
While I am impressed with the speed at which has moved to expose and dismantle corrupt orgs, I am not surprised at his fiscal policy, which looks to be more of the same as his first go-around which does nothing to actually shrink the size of government and saddles future generations to ever-increasing debt, virtually enslaving the populace to the federal bureaucracy, and not just in practice only!