Posts Tagged ‘paygo’

J.C. Arenas

The Unemployment Benefit Black Card

by J.C. Arenas

Tuesday, the U.S. Senate passed another Democratic multi-billion dollar legislative handout designed to temporarily alleviate the continuous financial burden hanging over the nation’s unemployed and fiscally irresponsible states.

Democrats—with six Republicans tagging along for the spending spree—swiped the nation’s Centurion Card to the tune of $140 billion, and went home with bags overflowing with goodies: subsides for health insurance, funds to prevent states from laying off public service employees, extensions of unemployment benefits, etc.

Senator Chuck Schumer—apparently now worried about the chattering class—patted himself on the back for a day’s work and proclaimed, “While our Republican colleagues on healthcare have been stonewall[ing], on jobs they know that they block us at their own political peril … and substantive peril as well.”

New York’s senior senator is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

This initiative can’t possibly be touted as a jobs bill when nearly 90% of the funds appropriated are unrelated to job-creation. Moreover, the Republicans who did cross party lines to support this measure, supported—what amounted to—another spending bill, and they might be doing that at their own political peril.

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Warner Todd Huston

Fiscal Responsibility Lasted Two Weeks In Senate

by Warner Todd Huston

Two weeks ago the U.S. Senate passed new rules that would require new spending to be offset somewhere else in the budget, the so-called paygo rule. They did this because Democrats and Obama got tired of being called big spending socialists and wanted the veneer of fiscal responsibility with which to cloak themselves. It lasted two weeks before the Senate broke its own new Obama-sponsored rule and went headlong for just another big spending program with its supposed jobs bill.

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On February 13 President Obama celebrated the paygo rule as a “common sense” rule that would “rein in spending.” Obama then said that the new rule would assure that Congress would be forced to “pay for what it spends, just like everybody else.”

It all sounds so grand. But it wasn’t to last. Maybe that’s why the Senate couldn’t abide by the rule, it was too much “common sense” for them to put up with?

Two weeks ago the Senate Republicans stood against the President’s “common sense” saying that the paygo rule didn’t do a thing to dampen spending but only gave Congress the dispensation to raise more taxes in order to fund the spending levels desired. All 40 Republican Senators voted against the paygo rule two weeks ago, though this week six voted to suspend the paygo rule for the jobs bill, newly seated Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts being one of them.

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