Somewhere, in the deep recesses of the swamp, a spending bill has been written that needs to be passed by Friday but that no one has seen. It's only Wednesday, which means if they were to release the bill now, politicians would be pulling all-nighters just to read and understand it, but still probably have little to no time to debate it. They definitely wouldn't have time to make revisions.
And that's kind of the point, isn't it? If the bill was truly understood, especially by the people, it probably wouldn't pass and that would mean bad news for certain people in Congress for various reasons.
The Firm™️ will soon release a huge spending bill to keep the government funded past Friday.
— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) March 18, 2024
It’ll be full of corrupting earmarks.
It won’t force Biden to secure the border.
It’ll perpetuate massive deficits.
It doesn’t have to be like this.
It all starts by voting “NO!”
Oh, but we have to avoid a shutdown! If the bill isn't passed, the government will grind to a halt!
Don't threaten me with a good time.
To be honest, if the government stopped for a significant amount of time, giving everyone time to truly sort out the spending problem, balance the budget, and begin paying off our debt it would be the best thing for us as a nation. However, that's not going to happen. Not right now. Not with the creatures we have lurking in the swamp swiping our nation's credit card every five seconds.
Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky threw up his hands and posted this on X, and I can't help but agree with this assessment.
I have come to the conclusion that an economic catastrophe must happen before a majority of my colleagues will get serious about curbing out of control government spending. I don’t know when those things will occur, but that will be the order of operations.
I have come to the conclusion that an economic catastrophe must happen before a majority of my colleagues will get serious about curbing out of control government spending.
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) March 19, 2024
I don’t know when those things will occur, but that will be the order of operations.
I'm afraid he's right, and it's something I've been saying ad nauseam on RedState, my show Brand Risk, as well as Comix Division's YAPC.
This isn't going to be fixed until we're about to collapse because no one truly understands how fast we're headed for it, including the people in Washington. Their heads are either buried in the sand or they're wholly ignorant of it. Going down this track will inevitably lead us to disaster, but for now, we still believe things are going to get better. They always do because we're America.
It can, but the issue is that it's not going to turn around by putting a more economically wise mind in office. If Donald Trump is elected, I have no doubt we'll see an improvement in our economy, but it's going to take more than that. Trump might help fix things but if, for any reason, another Democrat manages to convince people to elect him/her, then we're boned. It took Biden almost no time to destroy our economy.
No, it's going to take a mindset by the people. The people will have to have their backs pressed against a wall before they're willing to throw their hands up in the air and collectively agree that the government needs to be turned upside down, the creatures kicked out, and a reset button pressed.
We'll have to effectively follow the path of Argentina.
That country was buried in debt and only getting worse. The peso was monopoly money and inflation was off the charts. This sounds familiar to my readers.
You probably already know this story. Argentinians turned to a man who seemed loco. He spoke about terminating government institutions that were sucking money out of Argentina's coffers, lowering the tax rate, and obliterating government waste. Argentina elected this madman and now Javier Milei has done exactly what he said he'd do, and Argentina is reaping the benefits.
From The Economist:
Mr Milei, an irascible outsider and self-described “anarcho-capitalist”, campaigned while brandishing a chainsaw and promising to slash spending. On December 10th he took over a bloated state running vast budget deficits financed by printing money. Inflation was rampant; the value of the peso in the drain. The government owed $263bn to foreign creditors, including $43bn to the imf, but had no dollars whatsoever. Like many Argentine governments, the previous one spent far beyond its means trying to buy popularity, while inventing increasingly absurd temporary macroeconomic fixes (such as heavy price controls) to keep the economy wobbling along.
...
Start with his economic successes. To show there will be no more money-printing, Mr Milei is obsessed with achieving a budget surplus, meaning the government taxes more than it spends. He says he will achieve a surplus (before interest payments) this year of 2% of gdp, a huge change from a 3% deficit last year. In both January and February the government achieved monthly surpluses, the first in over a decade. It did so partly by using Mr Milei’s chainsaw: chopping down energy and transport subsidies, transfers to the provinces and capital expenditure. It also relied on another tool: la licuadora, the blender. Raising spending by less than inflation is a reduction in real terms, known in Argentina as licuación. Spending on contributory pensions, the single biggest budget item, fell almost 40% in real terms compared with the first two months of last year.
The sad part is that Milei has a very steep hill to climb and has a lot of fixing to do. Curing Argentina's economic system is probably something that he'll never finish and it will take a successor of similar mind to finish his work. Moreover, there's going to be some pain as he does it. This isn't going to be fun, at least for a little while.
America doesn't have to get this bad, but it will. It will continue to spend and drive itself into debt thanks to people who don't know any better and politicians who don't care. Trump will make things a little better but it will likely only be a temporary breath of fresh air that will ultimately lull people back into a false sense of economic security.
The wall isn't at our backs yet, but we're making our way there, and we won't lightly bump into it. We're going to crash into it. It's going to be painful and people are going to suffer for it.
But perhaps that's what's needed.
