Attention! Deficit Disorder!
Ever wonder why Congress keeps coming up on deadlines to fund the government in order to avoid the dreaded “government shutdown?” Were things always run this way? No, they absolutely were not. The explanation for the current fiscal insanity goes back to 1974 and begins with the idea that the fiscal year running from July 1 to June 30 didn’t really give Congress enough time (January to June 30) to create an actual budget, so they voted among themselves to change the dates of the fiscal year to run from October 1 of each year until September 30 of the following year. They did that rather than attempt to change the meeting dates of Congress because that would have required changing the Constitution.
Each Congress lasts for two years, and is required to meet at least once per year, even if it sometimes seems longer. They also adjourn for a month-long vacation every August and honor every national holiday by being somewhere other than Washington DC. The “crisis budgeting” concept has become the new normal since 1977, which happens to be one of the FOUR times in the last 46 years (1977, 1989, 1995, 1998) congressional appropriation subcommittees presented Appropriation Bills in time for the entire Congress to act upon them before the end of the fiscal year. Some years 2 or even 3 subcommittees do their actual jobs and present bills for approval, but in 17 of those 46 years exactly zero appropriations bills were ready for a vote, even with the fiscal year adjusted to allow “more time.” Like most ideas in Congress, it hasn’t worked out well, unless you believe avoiding budgetary responsibility was the point all along.
The Federal budgeting process is, in a condensed version, made up of seven steps:
The White House proposes the level of spending for federal agencies and programs, and outlines estimates for revenue and expenditures and presents the administration’s policy and spending priorities.
Budget resolution is an overall blueprint for spending and revenue and the resulting deficit to help govern internal decision making. Lawmakers have skipped this step in recent years, and instead worked out a series of 2-year deals that increased spending caps.
The appropriations process begins with the House and Senate appropriations committees being divided into 12 subcommittees that hold hearings to discuss budget requests and needs. Each subcommittee eventually comes up with a bill that must pass both chambers before presentation to the President. If the appropriation bills are not in place by October 1, a continuing resolution is needed to fund the government, almost always at the previous year’s level.
Authorization measures are used to create departments, agencies and programs, set funding levels and rules for how they are to operate. Many of these bills provide funding for more than one year, known as mandatory expenditures. Most authorization bills require congressional appropriations action and are known as discretionary. Mandatory spending includes Social Security, Medicare, welfare, highway spending and other programs already allocated in prior years, and discretionary spending includes national defense, transportation, education, housing and social service programs.
Most revenue measures are already in place and require no Congressional action unless they have expiration dates that require action to re-establish tax rates, credits or other rules.
Budget reconciliation is where budget resolutions are returned to committees and include instructions for them to meet again and work to meet agreed upon spending and revenue targets.
Debt limit legislation and raising the debt ceiling are caps on how much debt can be incurred by the government. Congress can either increase the debt ceiling or vote to suspend it for a period of time to allow the government to finance the difference between the amount of revenue and the amount of spending.
After the budgetary process is over, there are often bills presented in the form of supplemental spending for things the administration thinks are “too important” to wait for the next budget cycle to enact. You see that in the news almost weekly. Politicians never let a good emergency go to waste.
Congress often finds several reasons to ignore their own budgeting process. The first reason is that Congress finds it easier to maintain prior year spending levels and avoid budgetary debates and fund a continuing resolution rather than argue over cuts to spending and risk making someone - anyone - upset at those reductions. Remember that all 435 members of the House of Representatives and all 100 members of the Senate are running for election all the time, even if they are not. The second is that continuing resolutions often include new and/or increased spending levels for this or that program or agency the administration wants to increase. Appropriation bills, for example, are supposed to, by law, include ONLY spending levels and not authorization process legislation. That’s legislation that defines governmental programs and how they are to operate that, by Congressional rule, are only to be included in authorization bills. Several continuation bills have illegally included several hundred pages of legislative text. These continuing resolutions are, in effect, sneaky, underhanded ways in which congress abdicates its responsibilities and increases spending far beyond what they appear to be doing. It also gives Congressmen on both sides an opportunity, if anyone notices, to blame the other side for increased spending in which both parties are equally complicit.
Why is it so important not to make enemies by cutting Federal programs or spending? Here are some interesting numbers: The Federal government makes up almost 6 percent of the total number of workers in the US including 2.1 million federal employees, 4.1 million contract employees, 1.2 million grant employees, more than 500,000 postal service employees and 1.3 million active-duty military personnel. Not counting the military, that’s almost 8 million federal employees paid for with taxpayer funds. These numbers, by the way, do NOT include employees of state and local government. Cutting federal programs means cutting federal jobs, and those people and their families vote, and no party wants to be the one responsible for creating higher unemployment figures by cutting federal agencies, and remember, every federal agency is important to at least one member of Congress. By the way, the accountability aspect for Federal employees is practically nonexistent, and Federal workers are 44 times LESS LIKELY to be fired than those in the private sector. The Office of Personnel Management notes that about 12 Federal employees are fired each day, so if you are a Federal employee, you have a .0000015 chance of being fired for anything.
The other part is, hold on to your hat, money. More specifically, money that lobbyists from various industries distribute freely to the “reelection campaigns” of those members of Congress that agree to support, vote for, honor and insist that legislation for their respective causes is indeed in the best interests of the USA and taxpayers and God and that legislation against those same causes are Satanic or Communist or both. What are those industries? I knew you would ask. The industries and the amount in millions of dollars they contributed to lobbying efforts in 2022:
Pharmaceuticals/Health Products - 373.74 Electronics - 221.52
Insurance - 158.45 Securities/Investments - 137.78
Real Estate - 135.57 Business Asso. - 131.46
Hospitals/Nursing Homes - 124.66 Oil/Gas - 124.38
Electric Utilities - 124.03 Health Serv./HMO’s - 122.01
Air Transport - 118.13 Telecom - 117.54
Manufacturing/Distribution - 116.14 Civil Serv/Public Off. - 108.45
Health Prof. - 95.72 Internet - 94.6
Education - 90.83 Automotive - 81.31
Chemical Manufacturing - 65.91 Commercial Banks - 64.82
Add all the other players that participate legally - 13,784 organizations and 12,609 paid federal lobbyists - the total comes to over $4.1 billion in 2022 alone. Think that may have influenced legislation one way or another? Did you really think that politicians fight so hard for reelection just for the salary or the golden parachute? Think again.
Just how much money do politicians have to play with each year? What figures into the Federal budget? I’m glad you asked.
The IRS collected in 2023 $4,71 Trillion - that’s $4,710,000,000,000 - from taxpayers from income taxes, payroll taxes, corporate taxes, excise taxes, customs taxes, estate taxes, gift taxes …the list goes on. The total collections for 2021 was $4.05 Trillion, $3.42 in 2020, $3.46 in 2019…you get the idea. The numbers rarely go down by year. The problem doesn’t really come from the legalized theft from taxpayers; the real issue is that politicians spend much more than they collect. In 2023, those expenditures were $6.13 trillion, the projected expenditures in 2024 amount to $6.71 trillion, and the trend for the last 20 years or so has been ever upward.
Every year some of that income is spent in Foreign Aid, usually around $47 or so billion per year. This amount is more than 48 of our 50 states receive each year from the federal government. California and New York are the two exceptions. “This money” you might indignantly state “goes for food and educational programs in other countries.” You would be correct in that assertion. It also goes for - I am NOT making this up but I wish I were - choir directors in Turkmenistan, filmmakers in Peru, sex education workshops for prostitutes in Ethiopia, remedial reading programs in Zambia and a plethora of UN programs that receive almost $10 billion each year. The amount stolen by foreign leaders is unknown, but you know it’s there.
Why does our country insist on paying the rest of the world to hate us? Our government believes this aid is necessary to “maintain good diplomatic relations, assist allies and encourage pro-American sentiment abroad.” I guess the people that think that never heard their parents explain why you can’t buy friends or depend on those that hang around with you because of what you can do for them, and if you do so and find yourself in a tough spot, those “friends” disappear quickly, and you are left feeling alone and foolish. Maybe their parents did explain, they just chose not to listen, or maybe they’re naive enough to think that countries don’t act like people. You know, this whole “buying friends” thing might work better if our government kept track of where this money actually went and that it was actually spent on the things it was intended to be spent upon. They don’t. Or if they do, they are not very discerning as to the final destination of the dollars.
The NIAID (under Fauci) spent almost $500,000 investigating how to turn monkeys transgender. Over $300,000 went to a virtual reality penguin study. Our State Department awarded $25,000 in grants to Chinese surfers. Harvard spent $75,000 in grants to blow lizards off trees with leaf blowers. The US has sent $113 billion to Ukraine but can’t really tell you how much went for what and to whom. In 2022, the General Accounting Office noted $281 billion dollars made in “mistaken or improper payments.” Roger Williams University received $1.6 million for “equitable growth of shellfish aquaculture industry,” and a fisherman’s co-op in Guam got $3 million. In Dallas, a project to promote LBGTQ friendly housing for senior citizens was awarded $1 million, $2 million in Michigan went to convert “biosolids to fertilizer,” which means sending human waste to farmers, $4.2 million to “sheep experiment station infrastructure improvements in Idaho (insert your own sheep joke here), $100 million to the Mobile AL airport, a well-known hub of US transportation that probably handles hundreds of people a week, $2 million for “cultural placekeeping” in Nancy Pelosi’s district in California, and $650,000 for “digital equity” in the Bronx in NY. I could go on, but you see how this works. For far too long politicians have used tax dollars to buy themselves votes in their home districts through “earmarks" that should be the responsibility of states and local communities.
So, what all this comes down to is that there is no problem with revenue, the problem is politicians that have few, if any, scruples or qualifications as statesmen but far more interest and authority over reckless spending that seems to have become a political addiction. Warren Buffett said he could end deficit spending in five minutes. “We just need a law that says anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP all sitting members of congress are ineligible for reelection.” I think we are to the point that our country can no longer afford the lifestyle to which our politicians have become accustomed. That is, of course, unless you happen to agree their true purpose is to end our capitalist system and institute one of socialism/communism. With them in charge, of course. We all know how that works out. Read history. It’s all been done before and always ends badly.
I would rather not think they are so greedy and self-absorbed that they are selling out our country for personal gain, but there’s nothing new about that either, is there?
Just for a start, I think we should eliminate 25% of all Federal jobs, eliminate foreign aid, eliminate budgetary earmark expenditures, institute term limits for all elected officials, enforce budget restrictions, expect fiscal responsibility, institute fiscal accountability and eliminate supplemental spending except for disaster relief in the US. Fat chance, huh?
My other suggestion is this - rather than expect Congress to solve the issues they have created - they won’t because then they wouldn’t have any issues to promise to solve if re-elected - institute your own version of term limits and never vote for any career politician running for any office at any level at any time more than once. Think of it as a duty to help save America from politicians.