The Big Budget Story Of 2006

Brad Delong has a long extract from a piece by Stan Collender called Budget Battles: The Big Budget Story Of 2006 which begins by chronicling BushCo's budget failure:

Stan Collender:

That a House and Senate controlled by the same party couldn't agree on a budget resolution for the first time in history, or that only two of the FY07 appropriations were adopted by the start of the fiscal year. Without question, the biggest federal budget story of the year is that Republicans abandoned the policies they have been promoting since 1994. The Republican-controlled Congress and White House apparently realized that everything they wanted to do on the budget was so unpopular that continuing to pursue those policies would create big political problems. There's simply no other way to interpret what happened.

The political party that said it wanted to cut federal spending refused to bring up any of the FY07 appropriations that would have included those reductions. The only two appropriations that were approved -- defense and homeland security -- included increases in spending. The others were held until after the election, when spending can be cut or not cut without any immediate political consequences.

And ends on a decidedly unoptimistic note:

This leaves next year's budget debate in terrible shape months before it even begins. Unless there's a dramatic change, the Republicans' abandonment of their budget positions means that neither they nor the Democrats will have an idea about what they want to do. Combined with the likely narrower margins in Congress next year (regardless of which party is in the majority), this almost guarantees that work on the budget will be slow, halting and painful. It also means that incremental progress may be too much to expect. That could be the biggest budget story next year.

However, Brad maintains some optimism by seeing how paralyzing incompetence could be good thing. If the Republicans are unable to do anything, someone else might do something... and that couldn't help but be better. It reminds me of what a colleague once said about a mutual friend whose course was not going to be offered while he was on sabbatical -- nobody teaches that course better than Gordon.

Brad Delong:

I'm somewhat more optimistic. The fact that the Republican congress has no clue what to do on the budget creates the possibility that somebody like Treasury Secretary Paulson could lead them in a constructive direction. At least they won't automatically go in the destructive directions they have gone since January 2001.