Busting the federal budget wide open is already bad enough. As it turns out, Congress can’t even vote to waste more of our money without sneaking unrelated, awful policies into the bill.
The House of Representatives voted today to pass an almost $1.4 trillion spending package, increasing discretionary spending by another $50 billion compared to last year. It is, of course, true that nondiscretionary spending — the part of the budget Congress has already committed to entitlements — is what’s really driving our debt crisis to the point where we now collectively owe nearly $190,000 per taxpayer. Still, this bloated discretionary budget bill just makes things worse, dodging many meaningful opportunities for spending cuts and allocating more money to the bottomless holes known as our federal agencies.
It gets worse.
Congress decided to use this budget deal as an opportunity to slip several awful, unrelated policies into the bill, likely hoping no one would notice. Included is a seven-year extension of the corporate welfare machine known as the Export-Import Bank, a radical provision raising the tobacco age to 21, and an extension of the failed and unreformed National Flood Insurance Program.
Both Republican and Democratic establishment leaders know that if the Export-Import Bank were properly debated and scrutinized, few voters would actually support reauthorizing it. It exists to hand out taxpayer money to foreign governments and U.S. companies in the hope that they’ll buy more American goods and services, usually from Boeing. Longtime Ex-Im Bank critic and Washington Examiner Commentary Editor Tim Carney has rightfully decried the institution as “a swampy tool of self-enrichment for insiders,” and explained how it is “characterized by corruption and self-enrichment — of both the legal and illegal nature.”
This is the institution both parties just quietly voted to reauthorize.
So, too, the bill reauthorizes the National Flood Insurance Program, which was intended to step in where private markets had supposedly “failed” to insure properties in high-risk areas against flood damage. It’s been an abysmal disaster and gone tens of billions in debt, of course, but it also strips property owners of their economic incentive to relocate or build new property in safer areas, or for private insurers to enter the market at all.
The madness of this budget bill goes beyond mere wastefulness and corruption, as it also includes this nanny state increase in the age for purchasing both traditional cigarettes and e-cigarettes alike. The budget bill bizarrely includes a provision stripping American adults aged 18 to 20 of the most basic level of consumer freedom.
As my colleague Tiana Lowe wrote, “On principle, the government banning adults legally capable of dying for their countries from enjoying an evening cigar is egregious,” but it’s even worse that “it’s doing [so] in a bill that’s expressly intended to fund the government, not to expand it.”
But hey, at least the budget deal is bipartisan!
It’s just another reminder that the one thing both party establishments can agree on is new ways to waste your money and restrict your freedom.
