Eight weeks ago we had a president who was throwing a hissy fit and insistent that he would NEVER negotiate ANY deal on the debt ceiling – even though he was the one who as Vice President under Obama, negotiated the 2011 debt ceiling deal.
Of course, we would have liked to see deeper spending cuts, but the reality right now is Republicans only control one-half of one branch of government. The only way to get more progress in restoring fiscal sanity is to get a new president elected in 2024.
As a short-term fix, the debt deal stops the bleeding.
Since many of our conservative friends are opposed to the debt limit bill, we thought we’d include a graphic from Rep. Chip Roy showing the deal is a major walk back from Limit Save Grow in every area.
We’d love to hear back from you: do you support or oppose the McCarthy-Biden deal?
If Congress doesn't complete its appropriations work on time – and it almost never does – it passes what is called a “continuing resolution." But thanks to language in the deal written by Rep Thomas Massie of Kentucky, any CR would come with a 1% cut in spending from the previous year. Massie tells us he’s worried Congress will find ways around the cap, but it’s a great spending limitation reform nonetheless.
4) Democrats Were for Welfare Reform…Before They Were Against It
We’re disappointed Republicans watered down the work for welfare provisions of the debt ceiling bill. Only 20 hours of work a week is required, it doesn’t apply to Medicaid or many other forms of assistance, and single women with kids are exempt (which was a key feature of the historic and wildly successful 1996 reforms).
Why have Democrats become so opposed to work requirements?
From today's WSJ:
Sen. Joe Biden strongly favored welfare reform in the 1980s and ’90s. He argued that the welfare system had “broken down” and “does nothing to help the poor find productive jobs.” But now he says work requirements would “put a million older adults at risk of losing their food assistance and going hungry.”
New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman claimed that limiting food stamps “will lead to homelessness, incarceration and death for 38 million Americans.” Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock accused Republicans of “using poor people as pawns….”
All this should sound familiar. It’s a return of the histrionics from left-leaning Democrats in 1995-96, when Republicans proposed to reform welfare. New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg predicted American cities would resemble the streets of Calcutta, with “children begging for food and 8- and 9-year-old prostitutes.” California Rep. Nancy Pelosi said that the bill would devastate children and was “a dishonor to the God that made them.” California Rep. Maxine Waters labeled the bill “shameful.”
Eventually President Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996.
By nearly every objective measure, welfare reform with work requirements was a social-policy success. A Brookings Institution study found that after 10 years of these reforms, welfare caseloads plummeted by about 60%, “a decline without precedent.” The child poverty rate fell every year for a decade, and an analysis by the Manhattan Institute found that by 2004 the poverty rate of black children hit its lowest level in at least three decades.
Even the New York Times, which in 1996 attacked the bill’s passage as “a sad day for poor children,” admitted in 2004 the law was “one of the acclaimed successes of the past decade.”
5) NY Democrats Cap Charter Schools Even As Minority Families Fill Them
From The New York Post:
Two-thirds of District 5’s elementary and middle schoolers, and 57% of students there overall, have spurned failing and dangerous Department of Education-run schools, making the district the only one of 32 in New York City where a majority of kids attend a publicly funded, privately run charter school.
“We’re so miserable,” Mariama, a junior at the DOE’s Frederick Douglass Academy in East Harlem told The Post. “Please help us!”
But the stark enrollment imbalance has now made District 5 the target of a poison-pill rule in the new state budget barring new charters in any such district.
Under Gov. Hochul’s April budget deal, no new charter schools can be placed in any district that already enrolls more than 55% of its students in the alternative learning institutions.
This is a stunningly idiotic policy!
In other words, if over half the parents think the local public schools are rotten, and they prefer charter schools – Hochul says many kids must be forced to attend the bad schools. Why don’t they just shut down every failed school? Remember: this is Harlem, with predominantly black families. It’s hard for us to conceive of a more racist policy than this.
