In May, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said that “There’s no need to have a Democratic budget in my opinion.” and that “It would be foolish for us to do a budget at this stage.” The do-nothing Senate, led by Reid, has failed to do much of anything – useful or otherwise – on the nation’s budget crisis. Apparently, that has been intentional. “Senate Democrats are desperately trying to avoid having to present a budget to the American people,” said Senator Jeff Sessions. “They know that the big spenders in their caucus prevent them from bringing forward a credible plan that both their party and the country can support.”
Since then, the House Republicans have produced the Ryan plan and Cut, Cap and Balance. Not afraid to have their motivations on paper for all to see, they’ve done their work. The Senate Democrats seem more worried about being re-elected than performing their duty.
Well, turn the page, and today Harry Reid releases a Democrat budget plan for the first time in over 890 days. Or did he?
The plan is so far, just a statement:
- Raises the debt ceiling $2.4 trillion as requested by the President
- Proposes slashing spending $2.7 trillion without touching entitlements or raising taxes
Unfortunately, the plan has not been officially presented to show any validity to the spending cut numbers which most agree is impossible without entitlement reform and a tremendous broadening of the tax base to include the 50% of Americans that do not currently pay any federal income tax.
Considering Reid’s stance on putting his intentions in writing, it is difficult to expect that the plan will be anything more than a proposal to immediately increase the debt ceiling while Senate committees discuss how to get the cuts promised in his plan. That set of activities will likely end the same way as the deals made with Reagan and Bush where the Democrats agreed to spending cuts in order to get tax increases. The tax increases went in immediately and the spending cuts never materialized.
Congress, the President and even the media are continuing to create artificial deadlines in order to manufacture a climate of crisis. On Friday, the media was ripe with commentary and quotations telling Americans that if no debt deal was had by Sunday night, the Asian markets would collapse today. That hasn’t happened – at all.
Instead, it is reasonable to expect that continued date-pressure will be used to hurry bad plans through Congress – much like the rush to get Health Care Reform instituted.
