Oh crap! It's that governing thing again!

"How do I think this will end? The fiscal hawks will once again cave, and we will have a PORKULUS bill of some kind. Who will take it in the shorts? The taxpayers of course. They are the ones who will get stuck with the bill."   

Have I seen this movie before! You bettcha! Not only me, but also most of us reading this blog post. What are the Republicans good at? Ideas? For sure! Implementation of those ideas through governing? Not so much. Now here we sit, right before Christmas, with a broken government and a senile president. What else could possibly go wrong?

Here is a simple analogy on why some Republicans feel the way they do. My wife and I want to buy a new vehicle. It is a fancy one, so the payments (and extra insurance) would be about $1,000/month. We can't afford that vehicle unless we cut $1,000 from something else from our budget. Is that rocket science? No - it is kitchen table economics. Most of us do things this way - but not our government. There is no zero-sum budgeting - it is called debt financing, and now we are galloping towards 40T in debt. 

Every year we do this same stork dance. Wait until the end of the year and go into a full-fledged panic. The only way most Democrats and some Republicans will agree to an omnibus bill which will fund the government as well as shrimp on treadmills, is to load it up like Clark Griswald's Christmas tree. But this year, Congressmen like Chip Roy yelled "ENOUGH! What is the matter with Chip? Does he not want to help the struggling people in western North Carolina and Tennessee? Absolutely he does! But he wants offsets in the budget, so this does not end up in MORE DEBT.

Here is the rub. We have many in Congress who say, "Screw it - we will pay for it later" (and later never comes). And we have more and more "kitchen table" budgeters who want to pay as we go. With an evenly divided House and Senate, that leaves the year end funding looking like roadkill, with a broken government (again). 

Now everyone is mad at everyone else. The blame game has started, and Speaker Johnson might be on the verge of "throwing in the towel" or getting removed. I know it is easy to armchair quarterback, but I will do it anyway. It has been months since the storm which brought havoc to the western areas of Tennessee and North Carolina. As soon as we knew the gravity of the cost to repair and rebuild, Congress should have leapt into action. But they didn't. Too many vacations and doing mumbo jumbo to take care of this emergency. Put it off until year's end. So, here we are. The same place we always are at year's end.

How do I think this will end? The fiscal hawks will once again cave, and we will have a PORKULUS bill of some kind. Who will take it in the shorts? The taxpayers of course. They are the ones who will get stuck with the bill.