US House passes budget bill
February 2nd, 2006 by MaxCongressDaily reports that the budget reconciliation bill has been passed, again, by the House.
The House narrowly approved legislation to trim the federal budget deficit by $39 billion over five years Wednesday, 216-214, finally sending the measure to the president’s desk after a process that began with President Bush’s FY06 budget proposal last February.
This is the bill the left is saying will so drastically cut programs that civilization as we know it will end. Here’s a bit of perspective on that:
The bill accounts for about 0.3 percent of a federal budget expected to total about $14 trillion over five years.
House Majority Leader candidate Rep. John Boehner gets it right in his release about spending restraint:
Our real success in this effort will be determined not by what we have done, but what we will do next. That starts with fundamental budget and entitlement reform.
The big entitlement programs of Social Security and Medicare, which we all know are facing huge financial short falls in the near future, plus Medicaid, cost over $1,000 billion dollars last year. Any meaningful spending restraint must deal with these problems. By contrast, earmarks last year cost taxpayers $27.3 billion.
CongressDaily further comments on the passage of the budget bill:
CBO estimates the health programs and Social Security are the primary drivers of runaway mandatory spending growth.
While we’ll continue to hear about how much this bill is cutting funding for important programs for the poor and students, it is important to not that the savings we are hearing about come not from actually reducing funding levels for these programs below what they are today, but rather from reducing the rate at which funding has been scheduled to increaseâ€â€a decrease in the rate of increase. In Washington DC, when you increase spending by less than you had planned to it is a savings, or a drastic cut, depending on your view point.
