Holy shit! They're passing an actual set of appropriations! Real appropriations, rather than CRs! This... shouldn't be news. Congress is supposed to pass, and the president is supposed to sign regular appropriations that fund federal agencies from fiscal year to fiscal year (October to October because, why the fuck not?), but we stopped doing that back in 2011. Why? Remember when the "tea party" was a thing? Remember when they nearly drove the country, and hence the world, to financial ruin just for shits and giggles? Yeah, that...
Back in the summer of 2011, we needed to "raise the debt ceiling," which is supposed to be a routine thing. Forget the name. It just means giving Treasury the authority to issue the bonds necessary to fund the spending that Congress has already authorized through prior appropriations (or CRs) and "entitlement" spending (Social Security and Medicare, mainly). The debt ceiling is the statutory limit on the value of the bonds Treasury can issue, and if they aren't allowed to issue the bonds necessary to cover the spending they are required to cover, then... somebody's gotta break a law, and bad shit happens. So, we raise the fuckin' debt ceiling to prevent bad shit from happening. Nobody likes voting for it because saying "I voted to raise the debt ceiling" sounds bad to people who a) don't know what the debt ceiling is, and b) have a reflexive misunderstanding of the difference between private and public debt, but... damn it, raise the fucking debt ceiling. Or, if we were intelligent, we wouldn't have a debt ceiling. It's a stupid law, and other countries don't have one.
Anyway, back in 2011, after the "tea party" wave that brought the GOP to a House majority, they kinda forgot that as majority, they actually needed to vote to raise the debt ceiling. Normally, prior to that, it was the minority party that did its bullshit posturing against the debt ceiling. But, the teabaggers kept up their posturing, and either said no debt ceiling increase period, or demanded massive spending cuts. They pushed then-Speaker John Boehner to play a game of brinksmanship with Obama. The result was the 2011 Budget Control Act. It raised the debt ceiling (but didn't eliminate it), but also imposed massive spending cuts, and then, to make matters worse, created a "supercommittee" to propose more "deficit reduction" measures, and if that committee couldn't agree, we would get "sequestration." Across-the-board spending cuts intended to be so stupid-- so obviously stupid-- that nobody would let it happen. The supercommittee would come to an agreement. Except that the Republican position was that it should be 100% spending cuts, 0% tax increases, and the Democratic position was that it should be more than 0% tax increases, so... no agreement. Sequestration went into effect. Across-the-board, intentionally, recklessly stupid spending cuts, on top of those written into the Budget Control Act.
And that's where we've been. Incrementally, Congress has been trying to claw back bits of the dumbassery in sequestration, but fiscal policy has been set by the Budget Control Act of 2011 because... well, mainly because of the oh-fuck-it mentality.
We are finally getting new appropriations. The omnibus appropriations bill that is about to be passed is a real set of appropriations rather than the continuing resolutions that have incrementally modified the 2011 Budget Control Act spending levels. What does it do? There are bits here and there, and a lot of what is getting attention is the stupid, little shit, like "Fix NICS." That's a nothing bill, incorporated into the omnibus legislation as a sweetener. Mostly, what Congress is doing is undoing the Budget Control Act and sequestration to the degree that they can.
That's what's going on.
So, remember that big fight from 2011? Remember all of the stupid shit that followed between Obama and the Republicans in Congress?
Oh, never mind. We were just kidding.
Oh, and from a Keynesian perspective? In 2011, the economy was weak. That was when we should have been increasing the deficit. The economy is strong now. Now is the time to cut the deficit, for anyone who actually follows the logic of John Maynard Keynes.
