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| Source:U.S. Senator Rand Paul (Republican, Kentucky) |
I actually agree with a lot of what Senator Paul said here. But he gets a couple of things wrong here. The new spending in the Bipartisan Budget Act that is for defense and domestic programs is paid for by adjusting payments in Disability Insurance. As far as the Guns and Butter, that is what happens when you have a divided government where you have one party that always wants to increase defense spending and cut domestic spending, even infrastructure, which is generally a good pathway to reelection and the other party always looking to cut defense and increase domestic spending. So maybe we should look at the voters who send these people to Congress instead of the Congresspeople who just represent the people who send them there.
We do have a national debt of around twenty-trillion-dollars and I would love to bring that down and you can only do that through stronger economic growth, higher employment, with raising wages and deficit reduction. As long as you have a deficit, the debt will always go up. Which is how you get a national debt through annual deficits that are always adding to the debt. And again, divided government with a military oriented national security party that believes the best interest of corporations are always the best interest of the country. And a party that is more interested in domestic and economic spending, that tends to believe that the best interest of labor unions is always the best interest of the country.
So unless you have people from both parties who say, “we need to cut the deficit and I’m willing to give some of my priorities in a smart intelligent way, but I’m not going to hurt them, if you do the same thing with your priorities”, we’re always going to have guns and butter. Republicans, will get more military spending. Democrats, get more domestic spending like in the areas of infrastructure, education, medical research. And at best you’ll get a bipartisan agreement to fund and not borrow the money to pay for each parties priorities, but you won’t have a real agreement to deal with the long-term debt and budget deficit. That is how Congress works especially when the margins are fairly close both in the House and Senate and the President is from the other party that is not leading Congress. And this is also how you avoid government shutdowns and defaulting on the national debt. Which would have been the worst possible outcome.
