Spending on discretionary items, or those under White House and congressional control, is expected to run about 4 percent higher than last year, according to this McClatchy report. It is also three months past due:
As now approved, Pentagon spending will rise 0.7 percent this fiscal year-though Obama is expected to seek more money for the Afghanistan war early next year-while domestic spending should rise 8.2 percent, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a budget watchdog group.
When those budgets are combined, spending will grow about 4.1 percent — less than the 7.5 percent average of the past 10 years, but still well above the current 1 to 2 percent rate of inflation.
These numbers don’t include entitlements, nor do they include the emergency spending typical of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
Why the delay?
Democratic leaders attribute the budget delay to several factors. Harsh economic times require more spending and result in less revenue, they say. And they point out that passing the $787 billion economic stimulus occupied much of early 2009, war funding dominated spring deliberations and according to Democrats, Republicans kept throwing procedural roadblocks in the way.
Maybe by “procedural roadblocks,” what is meant is “opposition to a budget that is unsustainable.” In any case, this is apparently that fiscally responsible government we’ve been waiting for. Not that Bush was a saint in this regard — Republicans were more than willing to go along with his budget fudging. According to a study by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, Bush…
…fudged the war’s true costs in two ways. Borrowing money to fund the wars is one way of conducting them on the cheap, at least in the short term. But just as pernicious has been the Administration’s novel way of budgeting for them. Previous wars were funded through the annual appropriations process, with emergency spending — which gets far less congressional scrutiny — used only for the initial stages of a conflict. But the Bush Administration relied on such supplemental appropriations to fund the wars until 2008, seven years after invading Afghanistan and five years after storming Iraq.
This is how an economy loses its triple-A rating.
