Politicians decide: Let’s Spend Taxpayer Money
[Headlines from DRJ]
White House won’t move forward with billions in foreign aid cuts
The White House will no longer move forward with a proposal to cut billions of dollars in foreign aid that was allocated in the latest congressional budget deal, according to a senior administration official.
The Office of Management and Budget was expected to release a package this week calling for cuts in $4.3 billion in foreign aid through a process known as rescission. But the plan was taken off the table amid pushback from some top administration officials and lawmakers in Congress, the official said.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin were among those encouraging President Trump to at least scale back the cuts, and Democrats and Republicans alike had expressed concerns that any potential rescissions package could threaten a budget deal reached last month.
Go ahead. Tell me how Republicans are so much better than Democ4ats.
— DRJ
Dan Crenshaw 2024
If he survives his freshman term and isn’t eaten alive. Although he’s quite good at standing his ground and has a good grasp of real life. Ted Cruz was in the beginning too (I give credit to Cruz for his feisty zingers on Twitter). I am hopeful though. Forever hopeful, but I’m not sure what I’m hopeful in. Maybe common sense rising up again? But not in the Republican party. They lost me a long time ago. Won’t ever go Democrat though. While I look at all issues if it comes down to two candidates I’ll chose the one who supports life over death every single time. If you can’t value the life of the most vulnerable in the womb then you have no values in my book. And that right now is the only thing the Republican party has going for it. They certainly have nothing to crow about when it comes to spending, budget, etc. During the election all we heard about was debt debt debt. Now it’s like the word debt has been removed from the dictionary. Certainly isn’t in the GOP’s vocabulary.
Marci (405d43) — 8/22/2019 @ 1:15 pmVery bad move by Trump. Make the cuts.
Colonel Haiku (f1711c) — 8/22/2019 @ 1:31 pmwe’ll wait to see what Mulvaney’s budget proposal actually is, fancy that,
narciso (d1f714) — 8/22/2019 @ 1:35 pmIn this case Trump was preparing to do what we regularly criticized Obama for: undercut congress’s power of the purse through unilateral executive action. As one Congressman pointed out, Congress’s appropriations of foreign aid are not suggestions, they are the law.
The $4B in aid to be cut reportedly included narcotics control, health programs and UN peace-keeping missions the US had voted to approve. Naturally, Ivanka’s pet project was never in any danger.
In budgetary terms, $4B (0.02% of GDP; less than half a percent of the budget deficit) is irrelevant; this was just another dumb attempt to gratify the base’s resentment toward the rest of the world by violating the law and damaging US interests.
Dave (1bb933) — 8/22/2019 @ 2:10 pm$4.3 billion in foreign aid — which often amounts to “buy airplanes from Boeing” vs…
$16,300 billion for forcing people to do stuff they don’t want to do, at the point of a gun, and pay for it.
Yeah, I see a difference.
Kevin M (21ca15) — 8/23/2019 @ 12:25 pm