Defining profligacy down. Whatever!

The Continuing Appropriations Act, 2014 (CAA) is a defeat not for Tea Party Republicans, but for all Americans, particularly young ones.

The CAA does not raise the debt ceiling by some fixed amount, but simply suspends enforcement of that ceiling altogether until February 8, 2014, at which point the limit will be reinstated at the level of debt that has been incurred by then. This is the budgeting equivalent of throwing up one's hands and sighing "Whatever!" This same procedure of "suspension" was adopted in the No Budget, No Pay Act passed when we ran up against the debt ceiling earlier this year.

(Here's an analogy. Imagine that you have a credit card with a credit limit of $5000 and you have maxed it out. Instead of lifting the credit limit by some fixed amount (say, by $1000 to $6000), your bank waives the credit limit altogether until next February and says that your credit limit at that time will be reinstated at whatever amount you have spent up until then. Gee, do you think that might be an incentive to spend as much as possible between now and next February? I can guarantee you that all over Washington meetings are being held to figure out how to accelerate as much spending as possible into the period before the February deadline.)

These two pieces of legislation taken together represent the abject failure of our government even to try to rein in our profligate deficit spending (as I pointed out in a previous blog post, the federal deficit in FY2013 will be about $1T; that is, our federal government is spending about 1/3 more than it is taking in).

Such utter irresponsibility is given the name of "moderation" and "willingness to compromise" and the Tea Party Republicans who opposed it are labeled "extremists" and terrorists," even by members of their own party. Although we continue to head down the road to a Greece-like catastrophe, the news media celebrate the fact that the "crazies" have been defeated and the government once more can open the spigots of spending for a few more months.

This is how far we have defined profligacy down. How young people are not outraged by this fiscal debauchery (which they will have to pay for) is beyond my ability to understand.