{"id":1782391,"date":"2022-12-21T08:00:29","date_gmt":"2022-12-21T13:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1782391"},"modified":"2022-12-21T08:03:22","modified_gmt":"2022-12-21T13:03:22","slug":"stephen-moore-even-republicans-are-all-in-on-washingtons-end-of-year-spending-spree","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/stephen-moore-even-republicans-are-all-in-on-washingtons-end-of-year-spending-spree\/","title":{"rendered":"Stephen Moore: Even Republicans Are All in on Washington\u2019s End-Of-Year Spending Spree"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">24<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fstephen-moore-even-republicans-are-all-in-on-washingtons-end-of-year-spending-spree%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1782391&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/d73049b102fc9274e0dab29e9104ac4db32afcf2.jpg\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" alt=\"image\"   style=\"display:none\"><\/div>\n<p>The federal government is running annual $1 trillion to $2 trillion budget deficits, which is more than the entire gross domestic product of most nations. But if you believed that Republicans would take a chainsaw to the budget (figuratively) and slash the waste from the federal budget, then to paraphrase the &#8220;Oliver Twist&#8221; character of Fagin, the miser, &#8220;I think you had better think it out again.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>So far, since the midterm elections, the Republicans in Congress seem to be doing just the opposite. The first decision by House Republicans when they learned they had won a slim majority of 222 to 213 was to bring back earmarks. These are bridges to nowhere, peanut subsidies and sports arenas for local professional teams paid for by federal taxpayers.<\/p>\n<p>Some Republican lawmakers offer the excuse that it&#8217;s called bringing home the bacon to local constituents. But both parties apparently love to play Santa.<\/p>\n<p>Republicans justify the slices of bacon on grounds that if they don&#8217;t carve out earmarks, Democratic President Joe Biden will choose how the money is spent. Why not just spend less money? The late, great Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) used to call earmarks &#8220;the gateway drug to trillion-dollar spending bills.&#8221; And, boy, was he ever right.<\/p>\n<p>Even more preposterous is the size of this year&#8217;s $1.7 trillion &#8220;omnibus&#8221; spending bill for fiscal 2023 that Christmas-wraps hundreds upon hundreds of billions of congressional spending in one giant gift box to special interests \u2014 all with a bright red bow on top.<\/p>\n<p>Few read what&#8217;s actually in the omnibus. And that&#8217;s the whole point. No one knows what&#8217;s in it. This way, the Congress critters can claim plausible deniability when they learn of the subsidies for wool farmers.<\/p>\n<p>The current omnibus seems to be asexually reproducing as the size of the monster keeps getting bigger and bigger. Are Republicans really going to sign on to this &#8220;bipartisan&#8221; fiscal disaster? According to Heritage Foundation budget expert Matt Dickerson, it&#8217;s a real possibility. His numbers show that the lame-duck spending legislation may wind up spending more than the Biden administration&#8217;s inflationary American Rescue Plan, which cost $1.9 trillion.<\/p>\n<p>Add to this subtotal pension bailout, tax extenders, more COVID-19 relief money and other odds and ends, and this congressional shopping spree and the omnibus becomes one of the most expensive budgets in American history.<\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s worse is that my congressional sources tell me Republicans are agreeing to the fire hose of federal spending as a &#8220;retirement gift&#8221; to Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), who was first elected to the House in 1978 and to the Senate eight years later. Under the deal, Shelby gets some $600 million in bacon slabs for the state of Alabama. With this kind of money, they will have to rename Auburn the University of Richard Shelby. Wouldn&#8217;t it have been cheaper to simply build him a bronze statue? We have here what might be the most expensive &#8220;going away&#8221; present in American history.<\/p>\n<p>This sounds a lot like Washington budget-busting as usual. And there&#8217;s no pretense right now that either party cares too much about the hangover effect from binge spending.<\/p>\n<p>Congress has approved some $5 trillion of debt spending since COVID-19 hit these shores. That&#8217;s more money adjusted for inflation than Washington spent to win World War II. Worse, COVID-19 is long over, but the debt spending isn&#8217;t slowing down a bit. Biden has spent at a more financially ruinous pace than any president in modern times. But even with COVID-19 long over, Congress isn&#8217;t pulling back. The new pandemic in America is runaway spending debt.<\/p>\n<p>In a sane world, we would be searching under the sofa pillows for loose change and dollar bills to save money in bankrupt Washington.<\/p>\n<p>Instead, the Biden Democrats \u2014 Tweedledee \u2014 and now the congressional Republicans \u2014 Tweedledum \u2014 have struck a bipartisan secret pact not to do anything about our national addiction to red ink.<\/p>\n<p>Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and an economist with FreedomWorks. His latest book is &#8220;Govzilla: How the Relentless Growth of Government is Devouring our Economy.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p itemprop=\"imageCaption\"><small>Photo credit: <a href=\"https:\/\/pixabay.com\/goto\/2874026\/\" rel=\"external noopener\" target=\"_blank\">QuinceCreative<\/a> at Pixabay<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The federal government is running annual $1 trillion to $2 trillion budget deficits, which is more than the entire gross domestic product of most nations. But if you believed that<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1782394,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[547],"tags":[5458,10781,8448,3819,3756,3834,10782,7607,10783],"class_list":["post-1782391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-bongino-report","tag-bongino","tag-end-of-year","tag-moore","tag-report","tag-republicans","tag-spending","tag-spree","tag-stephen","tag-washingtons"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1782391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1782391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1782391\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1782394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1782391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1782391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1782391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}