Memo To The GOP Fiscal Fakers: At Least Try To Slash The Hated IRS By 50%

We pointed out earlier this week that the House Republican budget plan is supposed to be a “one and done” package en route to restoring the economic Golden Age of the Donald’s fervid political imagination. Actually, however, it is a plan to add $24 trillion to the public debt over the next decade, and that comes on top of the $36 trillion already in place.

But action last night in the Senate should have removed all doubt that the Trumpified GOP has already lined-up its firing squad in a circle, promising fiscal policy mayhem like never before. In this case, the leading culprit was Senator Lindsay Graham, who is an unreconstructed, war-loving neocon and also the new budget committee chairman in the Senate.

In rebuking the House GOP for attempting too much in “one big beautiful bill” per the Donald’s strong preference, he made absolutely clear that the Senate GOP is even less interested in spending cuts and curtailing runaway deficits and debt than the House Republicans. To wit, his budget resolution which passed in the wee hours on a party line vote did not even fake an interest in deficit reductions.

To the contrary, the Graham resolution’s main feature was gobs of increased spending, including another $150 billion for the already massively bloated Pentagon budget and another $175 billion atop the $55 billion per year already allocated to the Homeland Security Department for border control and related purposes.

To be sure, the Graham resolution purportedly claimed that this $325 billion spending increase should be offset with cuts in other areas of the government. But there was not a single instruction or line item—not even a whisper, really—in the Graham package suggesting where and how these cuts might actually be accomplished.

In fact, when the intrepid keeper of the faith from Kentucky, Senator Rand Paul, offered an amendment to mandate spending cuts of $1.5 trillion—the same anemic target contained in the House GOP resolution—it was voted down by a margin of 74-26. And more than half of the GOP Senators voted “nay”.

So we must repeat. The $1.5 trillion spending cut embedded in the House plan and the Paul Amendment would cut the $89 trillion Federal spending baseline over the next 10 years by the grand sum of 1.7!

And yet and yet: Even that was apparently too much to swallow for a majority of the Senate GOP.