While the country faces an unsurmountable amount of debt and bubbles threaten everywhere, our political leaders have agreed on another wild spending budget that increases the debt and deficit.
The agreement largely hews to spending caps for defense and domestic programs that Congress set as part of a bill to suspend the debt limit until 2025.
House Republicans, who barely control the House, got $16 billion in additional cuts over former Speaker McCarthy’s deal. It cuts $30 billion in total from the enormous, ceilingless budget.
“This represents the most favorable budget agreement Republicans have achieved in over a decade,” Johnson wrote.
Biden said the agreement “moves us one step closer to preventing a needless government shutdown and protecting important national priorities.”
“It reflects the funding levels that I negotiated with both parties and signed into law last spring,” Biden said in a statement. “It rejects deep cuts to programs hardworking families count on, and provides a path to passing full-year funding bills that deliver for the American people and are free of any extreme policies.”
It finally rescinds $6 billion in COVID relief.
“It’s a good deal for Democrats and the country,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told colleagues in a briefing call.
Essentially, Democrats see the trade-offs they made as mild. In a description provided to reporters, they said the COVID savings would have “no significant impact on any current projects or activities in motion.” And they said that moving all of the $20.2 billion in IRS cuts to this year instead of over two years would still leave the agency able to maintain “critical investments” that Congress provided in 2022. At the time, Congress provided the IRS with an additional $80 billion that could be spent over 10 years.
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