The next step in the GOP playbook

Congress passed a continuing budget resolution and the nasty guy signed it. That means a government shutdown didn’t happen today. But this isn’t a true 2020 federal budget. Congress gave itself until December 20 to make that happen. I’ll offer no predictions on how that will go. Or whether a raging nasty guy will sign it.

As part of the spending bill that got passed the Senate Budget Committee offered some budget reforms. They didn’t get into this bill because they weren’t in the House bill and some level-headed senators knew they didn’t have time for the reconciling process.

There are some provisions in the budget reform package that make sense and are long overdue (I haven’t read the details). But one provision is alarming to Hunter Blair of the *Economic Policy Institute*. Instead of a one year budget, Congress would create a two year budget (in itself not a bad thing). In the second year the Congressional Budget Office would report whether the debt-to-GDP target had been met (don’t fret over that detail) and, if not, special reconciliation instructions would be triggered. And (yes, now is the time to fret) that means cuts to major programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and just about every other part of the social safety net Republicans have been clamoring to eliminate over the last few decades.

Even worse, if that second year is part of a recession those cuts would mean both not assisting citizens affected by the recession and not allowing the government to help ease the recession itself. Both would make the recession worse. The CBO reports that it is in recessions are exactly when debt projections are most likely to be extremely off.

So yeah, something like this has been in the GOP playbook as the next step ever since they gave those huge tax cuts to the rich. This next step has been obvious to some of us since those tax cuts passed. Look for it to rear its ugly head again during December.