Speaker Johnson’s First and Last Hurrah
It’s a good thing the House GOP elected a “real” Republican leader the other day. In his debut action the new GOP Speaker kept the government open, by golly, and did so with a huge majority of, well, Democrats!
That’s right. Among the 336 votes for Johnson’s continuing resolution 209 or 62% were Democrats. By contrast, among the 95 nay votes, 98% were cast by Republicans. We’d guess the two Dems who voted “nay” may possibly be color blind.
Voting Station on US House Floor
In any event, the public debt weighed in at $16.4 trillion in 2013, and it had taken 226 years to get there. Now, in single decade that figure has doubled to $33.2 trillion and we are just getting started. Factor in the built-in policy deficits and another overdue recession in the next year or two, and we will be at the $50 trillion mark well before the end of the current decade.
To put it more dramatically, we recall well the angst that overcame the Reagan White House in early 1981 when it became necessary to raise the debt ceiling above $1 trillion to finance the red ink inherited from Jimmy Carter. Whatever was the financial equivalent of turning into a pillar of salt, believers in the old-time GOP religion of balanced budgets feared it was about to happen.
No more. The public debt has gone from $1 trillion to what will be $50 trillion in barely five decades. And yet today’s GOP cannot even seem to elect a Speaker who will take a stand for even the mildest gesture of fiscal restraint.
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