The best that can be said about the
House-Senate budget deal announced late Tuesday is that it includes no
tax increases, no new incentives for not working, and some modest
entitlement reforms. Oh, and it will avoid another shutdown fiasco,
assuming enough Republicans refuse to attempt suicide a second time.
The
worst part of the two-year deal is that it breaks the 2011 Budget
Control Act's discretionary spending caps for fiscal years 2014 and
2015. The deal breaks the caps by some $63 billion over the two years
and then re-establishes the caps starting in 2016 where they are in
current law at $1.016 trillion. Half of the increase will go to defense
and half to the domestic accounts prized by Democrats.
***
Breaking
the caps is a victory for Senate Democrats and House Republican
Appropriators like Oklahoma's Tom Cole, who will get more money to spend and will dodge another
continuing resolution that doesn't allow them to set spending
priorities. It would be nice to think they'll spend the money on such
useful purposes as cancer or Alzheimer's research at the National
Institutes of Health. But they will also get to dole out pork. The deal
means overall federal spending will not decline in 2014 as it has the
last two years.
To offset the extra spending without adding to the deficit over 10
years, the deal includes about an $85 billion grab bag of new fees, some
amusingly revealing program changes, and modest entitlement reforms.
The fees add up to about $26 billion over 10 years, and they are all
charges for government services that were proposed in chief GOP
negotiator Paul Ryan's previous House budget resolutions.
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