Following up on this morning's post, here's a little gem that makes even more mystifying the teabaggRs approach to budget sanity. Threatening to hold hostage the raising of the debt ceiling, they're making demands which, were they to become law, would make their current budget which they just passed... impossible. Like everything else they do and say, it'd be funny if it weren't so unfunny:
House Republicans voted to make the Ryan budget law. But the Ryan budget includes $6 trillion in new debt over the next 10 years, which means that to become law, the Ryan budget would require a substantial increase in the debt ceiling. But before the Republicans agree to increase the debt ceiling so that the budget they passed can become law, Republicans are demanding the passage of either a balanced budget amendment that would make the Ryan budget unconstitutional or a spending cap that the Ryan budget would, in certain years (and if you’re using more realistic numbers, in all years), exceed.
The point? Republicans have done a lot more thinking about how to run against spending, debt and deficits than thinking about how to handle them going forward. The specific plan they voted for blows through both their spending and debt caps, and that’s if you grant a series of assumptions it makes about health-care spending that even conservative wonks agree are “magical.”
To make it even more amusingly self-contradictory, Ryan's budget actually specifies the amount of higher debt for the next few years; higher than the current amount by a couple trillion bucks, here or there. Gee. Did Rs pass a bill without reading it? Seaspray? Seaspray?
