Pepperidge Farm Remembers

I forget, who writes the budget?

Oh yeah, the Congress!

The President is just a rubber stamp.

If he has a cooperative Congress he can get what he wants. If he has an opposition Congress he has to give them what they want in order to get his crumbs.

The Economy tanked in GWB's in his final two years. Guess who wrote the spending bills.

What is the actual number of the trillions allocated this year alfeady?

Biden borrowed 6 so far and not all the laws are paying $ out yet

The presses are overheated and need to cool off.

Hey! I was pulling down 7.5% interest on my IBM Credit Union account.

Yep. And your income was not keeping up with inflation so the purchase value of your dollars saved declined. It wipes away years of hard work & thrift.

I thought DrSarcasm would have a working sarcasometer.

Got it

Sarcasm can fail in written form. I will work on the meter idea! Awesome.

And Trump said he was going to pass stimulus too. And fix infrastructure. He just didn’t get to it.

And Biden said he would bring unity he just didn’t get to it

He will not either.

Well he's only been in for a few months. Its a little early to be judging his entire term in office.

I'm not actually sure how one would even go about unity when Republican's are divided on whether the election was fair. When Jill Cheney is canceled for calling out the lies. Are Republican's even willing to compromise on anything at this point? That isn't a hypothetical question. I think they are voting no on everything just to say their is no unity at this point.

That doesn't invalidate your point. Biden ran on the idea that he could somehow overcome this. I guess we wait and see.

He would have invested in transportation, technology, & utilities. Not welfare & give aways.

When you say give always, do you mean tax cuts?

Pork.

Ha, ha, ha, the Republicans tried to pass a clean assistance bill for the people.

The Democrats pushed the first stimulus bill through with tons of pork for liberal institutions.

Mr. Trump signed it to get the money to those people. Then the libs on here accused him of giving a bunch to the Kennedy Center, one of Nancy Pelosi's pet money laundering ops.

They kept send ing him bills with a bunch of deficit spending included and he vetoed them.

And today you and others are b******* about Congresses deficit spending during the Trump administration.

You will never see a Democrat President veto a spending bill.

Pork for liberal institutions - like what? Because most of what I saw pointed out wasn't if you dig in.

I think it was actually Republicans who had the issue with the Kennedy center. As far as it being a money laundering op...Melania was on the board. I don't think there was anything shady there on either side personally other than both sides trying to preserve the arts and then trying to make the other look bad.

Most of the relief bills were blocked by McConnel, even a few Trump said he would sign. I don't believe he actually vetoed any of the relief packages directly, but he implied he would and they didn't send it.

Ignore the COVID time period. I'm talking about before that. And I'm not actually complaining about it so much as laughing at the fact that Republicans are predictably ignoring the fact that under the best economy ever when the balance of power leaned their way, they didn't pay down the debt either. They passed tax breaks instead.

Republicans had a majority in both houses until 2018, so they had an opportunity to pass at least the 2017 budget with impunity. One side talks about the debt when they aren't in power, but neither side does anything about it.

Didn’t Trump use the war analogy for COVID and our invisible enemy? Doesn’t spending go up during war?

Joking aside, spending is high. But the point remains, where were fiscal responsibility concerns for the last 4 years?

Well

I would have been fine with the penny plan.

I would have been fine with a lot more vetoes of spending bills. Congress, contrary to what is reported, does not spend like drunken Sailors.

Drunken Sailors stop spending when they run out of money. Congress just authorizes printing mower paper.

You aren't wrong. Every dollar the government spends is a potential pork barrel for someone. So every cut is going to upset someone. So, the fiscal conservatives (I assume they still exist) have a hard row to hoe. When budget cuts = job cuts. There are quite a few poor rural white people on government assistance of one kind or another who vote Republican, but might change their minds if they have to to take care of their families. Nobody sees the things that help them as pork barrel. Its hard to cut the budget in an environment like this.

Just as an example of the politics of policy changes, the XL pipeline wasn't even supposed to pump oil for American consumption, and was only going to provide ~50 jobs. But its exaggerated to 1000's of jobs and higher oil prices. So, yeah. Politics is dirty pool, especially when the voter base maybe doesn't spend as much time as they should educating themselves on what is actually happening. Too many times, on both sides, its about how something makes you feel, not about what you think.