The New Budget

From the rugged Veronique de Rugy in Reason on the new budget deal:

 

"The bipartisan budget deal that the senators proclaimed so proudly yesterday would add $300 billion over two years to discretionary spending, not counting emergency funds and other add-ons. It would yet again burst the budget caps that Republicans negotiated in 2011 during a debt ceiling deal in exchange for giving more borrowing authority to the Department of Treasury. The debt ceiling would be hiked once again, allowing the Treasury to keep borrowing without asking Congress for an increase. Legislators wouldn't even have to pretend they care about how fast our national debt is growing.
Trillion-dollars deficits are coming back fast and probably are here to stay. And this time you can't blame that on a recession or a major war. It's a direct result of a Republican spending binge—an unwillingness to couple tax cuts with reductions in spending.

...we've repeatedly witnessed Republican hawks make deals with Democrats that amount to mutual back scratching: You can spend more at home if we can spend more abroad. This week's deal resembles those earlier ones in many ways, except that it's even worse. Military spending caps were $549 billion. The Senate wants to jack that up to $629 billion, with an addition $71 billion for war supplementals and emergency funding. The total for this year would be a cozy $700 billion, rising to $716 billion in the 2019 fiscal year.
In exchange, the Democrats get to hike nonmilitary spending by $131 billion over two years. The spending cap in this area stood at $516 in the 2018 fiscal year. It will now be $579 billion, with an extra $12 billion for war supplementals. That results in a sweet balance of $591 billion this year and $605 billion in the 2019 fiscal year. All this extra money will be spending on largely bipartisan priorities, such as infrastructure and the opioid crisis. The deal will probably pass in the House, despite the objections of the Freedom Caucus.
Worse still, the Republican leadership is trying to sell this spending spree as a bipartisan budget victory."

​
How many of our problems would be solved by the simple added sentence on every ballot, "None of the above."