By Michael Myllek

Late last week, President Trump signed a bill into law to continue funding the government for another two years. This bill will raise government spending by close to a trillion dollars for both years of the bill. Unfortunately, this bill demonstrates the sad reality that fiscal conservatism is dying as high government spending has become inevitable regardless of what party spearheads the policy making.

It is important to make a distinction here: this is not a budget. This is a funding bill. The broad details of the funding bill are that there are large spending hikes for both military and non-military spending and raised budget caps, which will allow the budget to be raised in the future.

Furthermore, the bill does not include anything regarding the state of DACA, though part of the reason the bill passed the senate was because of a promise by Majority Leader McConnell to bring a vote to the floor soon after the bill passed, it eventually did, despite a last minute attempt to limit the bill’s spending increases by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. This bill changes a lot, and I will do my best to unpack it, list its possible consequences and explain what it might mean going forward. First off, the bill drastically increases spending by about $300 billion over the next two years and raises budget caps which will allow future budgets to increase, thus rendering the Budget Control Act of 2011 powerless. Delving further into this, the bill increases both military and non-military spending over the next two fiscal years. The bill also provides an additional $90 billion for disaster relief in response to the many wildfires and storms that have hit the U.S. over the last year.

The bill also affects Medicare, as it repeals the Independent Payment Advisor Board that is meant to keep Medicare spending in check, though the board has never been utilized because of unusually slow rising Medicare costs. It also extends many subsidies to specific groups like rural hospitals, and increases discounts given to Medicare recipients by the pharmaceutical industry. The bill also extends the very popular Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) for an additional four years, on top of the six-year extension already in place from the tax cuts, and extends funding for publicly funded Community Health Centers for another two years. Energy was another clear target of this bill, as it gives large tax breaks to renewable energy sources, nuclear energy providers and bio-fuel. Finally, the bill also included some miscellaneous provisions, such as favorable tax rates or tax credits for timber production, miner safety, racetracks and horse breeders.

One political implication of this is the hole the senate Republicans have dug themselves into. This is not a budget, but rather a two-year long funding bill. This distinction matters because of the process of reconciliation, which is how Republicans get bills passed with only 51 members in the senate and no Democratic support, which is only allowed under an official budget. Since this is a funding bill with no formal budget in place, this process will not be allowed to occur until an official budget is passed. As Ben Shapiro, a conservative political commentator explains in his podcast, The Ben Shapiro Show, “…it’s not technically a budget, the reason that makes a difference is if you don’t pass a budget, you can’t use reconciliation processes to pass new bills…In order for you to pass a bill under reconciliation…you have to pass a bill that is budget neutral. Well that doesn’t apply if there is no budget.”

Clearly, this could pose a quagmire for senate Republicans moving forward. Until they are able to pass a real budget, they won’t be able to pass any law that would affect the budget, which in government is almost any law, using reconciliation. This means they would need 60 votes to pass a bill, which in today’s polarized politics is simply not feasible. Senate republicans have once again shown that they are politically incompetent, and if they aren’t able to pass a budget soon, it could finally come back to haunt them at the midterm elections when they have little to no meaningful legislation to point to as an accomplishment. When looking at a bill like this, only one word comes to mind: disaster. It raises spending by 300 billion dollars over the next two years and raises budget caps in the future so we can spend even more money. On the surface, this may not seem like a very big deal. After all, the bill averted a government shutdown.

Besides, government spending usually increases, so why is this bill any different? This large increase in spending matters because this time, Republicans control the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate. Many of these “conservatives” are in office right now because they campaigned hard against the huge spending hikes by the Obama administration, giving a voice back to libertarian thinkers that wanted a smaller Federal Government and to minimize the national debt under the “Tea Party” Movement.

However, last Friday proved that much of this message was a partisan lie: another opportunistic political maneuver to get elected and retain office in Congress for as long as the candidate would like, as there is often very little turnover in Congress. Many of the same Republicans who campaigned on the platform that Obama’s administration was growing the bureaucracy and power of the federal government at an outrageous rate voted “yea” on Friday’s funding bill. The bill goes against everything the “Tea Party” believes in except the reduction in military spending. This shows me, as someone who wants limited government, that these “Tea Partiers” are only for fiscal conservatism when it is politically expedient for them. They hate spending when it’s healthcare and entitlements under a Democrat, but when the same things are funded with the military under a Republican, their tunes change and are all for spending all of a sudden.

Therefore, this bill matters because it is proof that the era of both parties spending big is upon us. Further, budget caps being raised means that the deficit will be allowed to grow at a faster pace than previous caps would’ve allowed. I know most people are tired of hearing about the deficit, but it is now at over $20 .5 trillion. Our Gross Debt to Gross Domestic Product ratio is now at 104.2 percent, meaning we owe more money than we take in over an entire year. Most economists will tell you that this is an extremely unhealthy number and will eventually be a real problem that we may not be able to solve. As Veronique de Rugy of George Mason University explains, “Last but not least, the government must reduce our debt-to-G.D.P. ratio…” The answer here is probably spending cuts. Fiscal adjustment packages made mostly of spending cuts are more likely than tax increases to lead to lasting debt reduction.

Clearly this is a problem that we will have to face as a nation one day, it just appears that neither Congressional Democrats nor Republicans want to make that day today.

Michael Myllek, FCRH ’19, is an economics and political science major from White Plains, New York.