Fed Spending Tsunami, US Under Water

As a $31T national debt hangs over US, Henninger reminds last wk’s historic House speaker fight “is about spending” & how we got to this “low ebb” thanks to removal of last shackles to Congress spending 50 yrs ago.

Opines the WSJ columnist: “Conservatives from Kevin McCarthy on the right to Matt Gaetz & Lauren Boebert on the over-the-cliff right, have legitimate grievances with the Pelosi-Biden $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill, coming atop the trillions outputted through the pandemic” and not to mention that magnificent national debt that keeps mushrooming. As Henninger recalls, “In the early 1960s, Illinois’s senator from central casting, Everett Dirksen, famously intoned about spending “a billion here, a billion there.” Dirksen didn’t live long enough to see it become a hundred billion here, a trillion there. [But] a decade later, the spending dam broke. President Richard Nixon tried to block Congress’s spending by using the presidential impoundment authority, refusing to spend money appropriated by Congress. Enraged at Nixon’s impoundments, a Democrat-controlled Congress passed – and a Watergate weakened Nixon signed – the oxymoronic Budget & Impoundment Control Act of 1974.”

Henninger concludes: “The act removed the president as an active counterweight to Congress’s spending.” The rest is history as the nation’s debt has been climbing since. Although there have been occasional attempts to reign in the spending sprees, Henninger concedes, they’ve all failed, at least, in the long run. And when one party controls both the White House AND Congress as it after the 2020 elections? Taxpayers might as well give the Speaker a blank check?

Davd Soul