This week President Trump signed the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, increasing America’s war budget to a whopping $717 billion. For comparison, this is roughly equal to the next 11 highest military budgets combined.
In fact, the $107 billion increase from last year alone is roughly equal to the total military spending of Russia and Germany together.
Congress isn’t done spending taxpayer money yet though. Next up is a spending bill that will fund the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Defense, because the Pentagon apparently can’t get by with a humble $717 billion. This will be the third “minibus” to pass Congress in 2018, the result of which has been the US running its highest deficits in years.
Of course reckless Federal spending isn’t anything new. What is particularly noteworthy about Congress’s recently behavior is that it has now become extremely efficient at passing these spending bills.
Congressional budgets are broken up into 12 different bills. When this next package clears the Senate – as expected – it will have passed 9 of the 12. As Axios notes, the Senate “has already passed the majority of spending bills by early August for the first time since 2000.” Should Congress continue on this pace and complete all 12 budgets by October, it will be the first time this has occurred since 1996.
None of this is surprising. As Ryan McMaken noted prior to the 2016 election, no one spends money more liberally than a Republican-controlled Federal government. Ideas like fiscal responsibility (and political decentralization) makes for great rhetoric in a political minority, but are extremely inconvenient when in a position of political power.
What makes this all the worse is that the GOP’s fiscal irresponsibility will inevitably result in blow back for some of its better policy victories, such as last year’s tax cuts.
Already progressive outlets are trying to peg last year’s reforms as the reason for historically high deficits, even though tax cuts have (unfortunately) increased government revenue. As such, when the Democrats next find themselves in political power, we can count on a push for tax increases to address America’s fiscal ills – likely while advocating for a new list of new government programs.
This cycle will continue to play out until the power to spend is taken away from Washington. The question is whether it will be due to a debt and monetary crisis, or pro-active restraints placed on it from the states.
