Congressional Budgeting

This week the Senate Democrats and the House Republicans are each going to pass their irreconcilable budgets. The Senate is, presumably, going to include higher taxes on wealthier individuals. Paul Ryan's House budget will apparently include the repeal of Obamacare, except for the medicare savings that he supported in his last two budgets but ran against as vice president.

This is all being done to try to give the Republicans a political victory. The House has already passed two unpopular versions of the "Ryan plan" and they feel that the Senate Democrats have been getting an unfair pass by not passing a budget. That is why they used the debt ceiling to force the Senate to pass a budget. I think their assumption is that they will be able to attack the budget from two angles: 1) look how much it raises taxes! 2) look it does nothing about the deficit!

This is all silly, but my hope is that this will be a turning point in Washington. Now that the two respective budgets are on the table, maybe we can turn to something like immigration or climate change. The Republicans and Democrats fundamentally disagree as to the course of government fiscal policy, nothing is really going to change this.

Let's reveal our budgets, move on to something else, and see if anything changes after the midterms.