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I’ve been relatively happy with McCarthy. But I support Ukraine funding.
We do need to cut federal spending. The current levels are harming the economy. If we cut federal spending it would cause demand to fall. But that fall is easy for the fed to compensate for by cutting rates. We could go back to the 2010’s economy of big but workable deficits and low rates. Bidenomics has been a disaster.
Also I wish they were doing a better job impeach Biden. (Let’s not relitigate that but personally I believe it’s correct and just).
...
I don't understand how these sentences can be placed so close together.
McCarthy negotiated a deal with Biden for below-inflation increases in federal spending (including cash-flat discretionary spending). In real terms, that is a cut. Given how high inflation was, it would be the biggest real-terms cut in federal spending since the Clinton-era welfare reforms.
The approach McCarthy was taking is a perfectly reasonable approach to cutting spending for a party that can only win elections by promising not to cut any of the big, popular programs.
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You could feel that his options are tightly constrained by his thin majority in the House and his opponents holding Senate and Presidency. He doesn't have many good options and is unlikely to be able to cut spending, so avoiding damaging chances for Republicans in the next voting cycle (which a shutdown might do) may be the very best that can be done. Patience in politics is rare, but it can be valuable.
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"other than that, how was the play?"
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He only holds the house by a few votes while the other party has the Presidency and Senate.
Government shutdowns have tended to be bad for the party that does them.
Which is to say the Republicans, because if the two sides don't agree, it's always the Republicans who get the blame (because the media decides this).
For as much as this forum has talked about how conservatives need to refuse to cooperate with dems on matters of policy, this seems a bit cheeky. The mean old media is just so biased, the republicans surely had nothing to do with any legislative gridlock.
I mean. Rarely. Whenever Republicans have control of a branch they typically pass financing regular order bills piecemeal, as is supposed to happen, for the majority of departments months in advance. And then the other branches either don't vote on them or promise to veto them until an omnibus/cr is passed. This is why the "shutdown" and "debt ceiling" canards are as such, the Democrats have, over the last 12-15 years, never passed regular spending bills for the subsections of the government. Like, the Republicans could pass a bill for DOD the Dems would vote for (as is supposed to happen), but they just wouldn't put it to a vote, because then they lose the leverage of soldiers not getting paid (which the media would unfairly pin on Republicans) because republicans wouldn't fund 300 billion in solar panels in Toronto.
The focus is on Republicans here because they specifically didn't do that, and the hold up was opposition by the right flank.
This even though ironically the Appropriations Committee passed all 12 bills with full markups and on a bipartisan basis for the first time in forever.
Indeed, but this also indicates a total lack of bipartisanship from Democrats. If there are all 12 passed, and 8 Republican holdouts, a good faith few Dems would go with it. Just like this motion to vacate. McCarthy has shown to be a good faith partner, even if he holds to principles. His reward was the Dems giving him zero good faith in return on the motion to vacate.
I think you might have the OOO mixed up, most of the bills were never taken to the floor for the Democrats to vote for or against either way. First the majority party agrees on a "rule" which is where the hold up was. To my knowledge it's unheard of for the Speaker of the House to ask the opposition party for help getting bills to floor, and McCarthy certainly didn't do that.
?
He pushed spending bills that were significantly lower that what he committed to in the debt ceiling negotiations and then even after the Democrats saved him, he did a public press conference blaming them for the hold up, even though he's admitted countless times it was the Freedom Caucus. This is most certainly not good faith.
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Agree. Two additions.
This is kind of what's going on with Tuberville's hold. He's holding DoD senior officer promotions until the Dems give him a floor vote on the DoD abortion policy. He's stated he'll abide whatever the result of that vote is and lift the hold. The goal, for Tuberville, is to either get the DoD abortion policy changed or, at least, get a bunch of Dems to vote explicitly in favor of keeping it. The one wrinkle is that, to my knowledge, he hasn't offered anything to vote on and has asked the Dems to bring their own policy package, which is kind of weird. The headlines always stop short at, "Republican Senator holds all DoD promotions because he doesn't like abortion." He just want's a vote.
I'd eagerly wager that 99% of Americans cannot accurately describe regular order in either chamber of Congress. Fewer still can give a good outline of the bill-to-law pathway through committee, amendment processes, markups, etc. The procedural realities of Congress make time the precious commodity. There just isn't enough time to do everything. Worse, when you have goofy distractions all of the time, there's frequently not enough remaining to do even the important things correctly (like passing a budget on time). So, you end up with omnibuses,CRs, and generally slipshod work for literally the last 27 years.
But reporting on the complexity of Congressional process doesn't get viewership, and "political reporters" can be technically true in writing headlines like "X opposed Y resulting in Z." I can't begin to enumerate the ways the media has failed since about the 1970s onward, but especially after the internet became ubiquitous. One of the chief failings, however, is in the media's ongoing failure to simply report on the mechanics of government (or, for that matter, economics and business cycles). The default is such overly simplified narratives that they cease to be functionally useful or even complete. What's a narrative structure without functional use? It's a story. It evokes emotion, it pastes a concise arc over a complex situation. Satisfying, but useless and incomplete. If you repeat that for years and years, eventually the audience can only conceive of "information" and "news" within the structure of emotional narrative arcs. Anything outside of that format may serve some other niche purpose, but isn't "news." Reporters have ceased to know what they're talking about, focusing, instead, on knowing what has already been said (knowledge v. narrative). It's a self reinforcing feedback cycle. Today's "news" is an expansion and commentary on yesterday's "news" and an easy to follow narrative line is important.
I like to imagine a headline on NYT/WaPO the reads "Here is a guide to how committee markups work" and then imagine the first comment being "What does this have to do with Congress?"
Imo it's kind of reasonable not to set the precedent that we can hold up the functioning of the government so one guy gets to have a vote on a very tenuously related issue he's into. The Senate has passed a ton of bills the House is never going to look at either, that's just how a divided Congress goes.
Otherwise 100% agreed the boring, procedural stuff and general gov mechanics are super important and I wish they were reported on more.
I mean, it doesn't hurt that all these DOD appointments are pretty bad as well, if they were not there would be pressure from his own side to release some of the holds. He's both doing his own hobbyhorse thing, and improving national security (in the view of most Republicans).
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“Mine, yours, theirs” asymmetry: “Democrats show admirable solidarity in the face of Republican radicalism,” but “Republicans cause gridlock, refusing to cooperate in a spirit of bipartisanship.”
Tribal bias turns negotiable differences into irreconcilable divides. Each side’s marketing says it is the only side operating in good faith on the side of good, making good decisions for the good of the people. This is why politics is the mind-killer.
for what it's worth i understand how "the media" doesn't mean the exact same thing to our two fine political parties, but it still annoys me that this discussion ignores the existence and popularity of right wing media and pundits. Fox news doesn't frame the discussion this way and i think they count as "the media"
as for mindkilling, i fully agree. more and more i have a hard time wanting to wade into political debate because it legitimately always devolves into arguments i have had since i was 16 years old and there often isnt any objective correct answer.
one of the reasons that i'm pro hypothetical AI overlord is that it would be interesting to see what an "adult" thinks about our sibling squabbling
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It takes two to tango, but somehow only one side ever gets accused of dancing.
More like neither group really wants to dance but one side is happier with the lack of dancing than the other
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What should we cut? If you don’t want to cut Ukraine spending I presume it isn’t defense. Social security is reckoned separately from the rest of the budget. Everything else is a rounding error.
Nonsense. Here's a tool that's easy to tinker with and see what the options are. Given how many federal programs I think are negative net value, my preferred policies would result in nearly budgets within a couple of years through simple drawdowns to things like SNAP, education, and healthcare spending. I recognize the difficulty of large immediate cuts due to system shocks, but in the longer term, I see no need for federal education spending, federal "nutrition" spending, the ATF, HUD, and numerous other programs. Hell, just federal food spending is nearly $200 billion, which is not a rounding error.
That's a cool tool, but it takes far too many clicks to zero out programs.
Just like in the real Congress.
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We went from sub 21.5% federal spending on gdp last decade to slightly over 24% since COVID. So that 2.5%. Ukraine spending might be .3% of that increase.
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I agree that artificially restricted supply has a lot to do with spiraling medical costs, but I'd really prefer the order of operations to be
Remove supply restrictions -> Price goes down -> Slash programs that were helping people afford the high prices,
instead of
Slash programs that are helping people afford the high prices -> A few politicians promise to lower the prices -> Oh, wait, they didn't -> Fuck.
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One of the reasons supply is restricted within medical care is because MMS helps fund residency slots and have historically capped their funding at '96 levels, keeping supply of doctors lower than it could be. Only in 2022 have we started to fix this and raise the residency slot funding. Cutting MMS funding would be moving backwards on doctor supply.
Most of the rest of the supply restrictions are state level like Con and COPA laws. Cutting MMS funding won't do anything to fix those problems.
Yeah, and if you cut Medicare’s budget, the bureaucrats running it will take it out of the actually useful fraction.
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My point that it's an oversimplication to describe federal spending as "just subsidizing a good that has a restricted supply because of over regulation." Just as easily a lack of funding can be the root cause of a dearth of supply.
Administrative excess should be culled everywhere, but I'm unconvinced that "the rest of [the budget] is bloat". From this graph on their budget it looks like a reasonable 5-10% is administration while the overwhelming majority is compensation for services, 50% for hospital care, 25% for physician services, and the remainder broken between prescription drugs, and smaller categories like equipment and nursing homes.
I'm unconvinced the future is bleak either. The largest growing category in spending has been prescription drugs and the IRA should arrest that trend substantially. You've likely also read the recent headlines that our projections have wildly overestimated growth in Medicare spending, which has leveled off significantly per beneficiary for the past decade.
This is like saying the government restricts the supply of tanks or something. There's no regulation artificially restraining something that would be in more abundance on the free market, the subsidy just isn't big enough. There is no law restricting resident doctors, which hospitals can have as many of as they want, there just isn't extra public funding to have more of them, so hospitals make up funding shortfalls out of pocket, from state governments, or philanthropy. Cutting government would ofc result in less residency slots, not more.
There are lots of regulations that genuinely do restrict the supply of medicine via laws that shield hospitals from anti-trust and prevent new competitors from emerging. But these are mostly on the state level. Even the lengths of residencies themselves are usually required by state-level licensing rules. If there's anything federal scale that's as significant as CON/COPA laws, I'm more than interested to hear about it though, that's why I asked.
Access to medication is gated behind prescriptions. Even if you know exactly what is wrong with you and exactly what medicine you need, you have to go to a doctor to access it. I guess this is more inflating demand rather that restricting supply, but the result is the same
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As with so much government spending, I am told that we need government spending due to the onerous government regulation that creates a need for government spending. There is, of course, another option available.
I'm all for cutting unhelpful regulations, but which federal regulation would substantially reduce healthcare costs? The largest increases in costs have been from physicians and hospitals becoming increasingly consolidated monopolies, and this has much less to do with federal law than state-level rent seeking.
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