It’s Tuesday morning. In three days, Congress must pass legislation to fund the federal government or that government will shut down.
To be clear: The government will NOT shut down. Neither party wants that with Christmas approaching rapidly (7 shopping days left!) and with a new president coming to Washington next month.
A bill — a continuing resolution no less! — WILL pass. The problem? It will spend BILLIONS of dollars on everything from disaster relief to farming subsidies — and not a single member of Congress will, really, know what’s in it.
Tennessee Republican Rep. Tim Burchett nailed it with this tweet Monday night:
And to make things even worse, consider this: All this bill will do is keep the government open for three months. Congress can’t actually pass year-long appropriations bill anymore and so they operate via continuing resolutions — the legislative version of kicking the can down the road or, in the words of famous philosopher Homer Simpson:
This is no way to run a country. Spending billions of dollars without even knowing where all (or most) of that money is going is beyond fiscally irresponsible.
And it has real impacts. In August 2019, the national debt was $16 trillion. Today? It’s north of $36(!) trillion. We are approaching the level of debt the country held while fighting World War II.
Like, WHAT?
This is a bipartisan problem. Both sides have been far too willing to use these last-minute funding mechanisms to avoid the political peril of a government shutdown while cementing the notion that spending without knowing what we are buying is a-ok.
Long-term financial implications are sacrificed at the altar of short-term political expediency. But, at some point, that bill will come due. And it won’t be pretty.
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