You are incorrect. I was referring to the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993. It was not an attempt to get Bush 41 to do anything, since he was out of office by that time.
Do you have cites for any of your other claims? In particular, I’m asking for evidence that Clinton’s budget proposals had extended projections of $200 billion deficits and that Congress overrode his veto of a balanced budget. I can find evidence of only two overridden vetoes during his administration, neither of which was a budget.
Well, posting a cite that Clinton vetoed the Republicans’ proposed budget indeed does not help with fulfilling Robot Arm’s request for a cite that Congress overrode Clinton’s veto. What exactly were you referring to when you claimed “Then, some time later, the GOP regained control of Congress, and balanced the budget. Clinton vetoed this, but was overridden”?
I still don’t see why we need to discuss Democrats for this thread. Whether or not current/former Tea Party members are hypocrites has nothing to do with Democrats. Perhaps Tea Party members recently compromised fiscal integrity for a concession on some other issue, but if they refused to do so for the same issue under Obama, that constitutes hypocrisy and we need not discuss the merits of the compromise itself.
The Tea Party started as a reaction to Obama and the 2009-11 Democratic congress, ostensibly over concerns regarding fiscal irresponsibility. Now they’re silent in the face of Trump’s fiscal irresponsibility. If we’re to judge the alleged hypocrisy of the Tea Party, we have to weigh the relative fiscal irresponsibility of Obama and the Democrats vs. Trump and the Republicans. That’s hard to do without talking about Democrats.
There are hard numbers cited in the original post. Exactly how much better (or worse, I suppose) the Obama administration’s fiscal policy was is irrelevant because the Tea Party still found room to criticize Obama. I don’t think anybody here is arguing that Trump oversees a fiscally conservative administration. If they did, the response would be simple: the Tea Party is dead because Trump balanced the budget. Nobody is saying that because it is untrue.
The budget is unbalanced, where is the Tea Party? Is their dissent being drowned out by other issues? Did they all die? Are they hypocrites?
Yes, the Tea Party found room to criticize Obama because that was their true – maybe only – reason for being. The “fiscal responsibility” part was just a fig leaf.
How do we know? Because the Tea Party is silent on Trump, despite his administration’s being demonstrably at least as fiscally irresponsible as the *Democrats *under Obama.
If the Tea Party had been criticizing the fiscal performance of every administration since Reagan, then you could call their current silence hypocritical without discussing Democrats. But they came into being specifically in reaction to a Democrat, so you can’t.
This is actually the conclusion of the debate, not an argument for a conclusion. I would rather see the argument and evidence. It has not yet been established that the Tea Party movement is silent, only that they are not effective.
Can’t I?
A July piece in the New York Times says one hundred thirty-two Republicans voted against the recent budget agreement (Cochrane, 2019). Notably, Mrs. Pelosi didn’t need any Republican votes to pass the bill, so it really doesn’t matter what the House Republicans think about it - nobody cares what they have to say. The Washington Examiner and National Review are still complaining about the budget (Klein, 2019; Riedl, 2019). So does the Heritage Foundation (Bogie, 2019). So does Rand Paul (Re, 2019). I’m sure some other Republican senators voted against it, such as Ted Cruz, John Kennedy, and Tim Scott.
But then we look back at the 2017 and 2018 sessions, to the Republican-controlled House under Paul Ryan, himself a Tea Party politician. Why didn’t he rein in spending, like he tried so hard to do under Mr. Obama’s presidency? Is this not hypocrisy? The National Review article places the blame on Mr. Trump’s election in 2016 (Riedl, 2019):
I think that is an accurate political analysis, although it removes none of the apparent hypocrisy from the shoulders of the Republican party. Wasn’t it Mr. Ryan who appeared in The New York Times back in 2010, saying “Both parties have done a poor job of doing adequate oversight of the federal government, from a fiscal and good-government standpoint. We need to do a better job” (Zeleny, 2010)?
I have no doubt that Mr. Ryan would have cut entitlement programs if he had the support of the Presidency and the Senate. Even in January of 2018 Mr. Ryan said he wouldn’t be tackling entitlement reform that year despite it being the biggest item on his “wish list” (Stein, 2017; Bryan, 2018). He didn’t even try (publicly) because the Senate’s slim majority preempted the debate. Maybe he was trying to avoid Senate deadlock and another government shutdown a la 2013, but as we all know, he failed spectacularly - the government shut down both a week after making that statement and again at the end of the year.
I personally think Mr. Ryan stopped representing the Tea Party movement and started representing House Republicans as a whole when he became speaker. Party over ideology. That is the only explanation that I can find for his behavior. Republicans like Mr. Trump or Mr. Nunez probably thought Mr. Ryan was too passive. Tea Party Republicans probably think he traded his soul for the tax cut. I don’t agree with most of the cuts typical of the Tea Party or championed by Paul Ryan, but I don’t think Mr. Ryan practiced what he preached.
Would anyone else care to look at other Tea Party Republicans?
OK, you win. You **can **establish that the Tea Party is a bunch of spineless hypocrites, who cared far more about gaining power than actually practicing fiscal responsibility, without mentioning Democrats.
I don’t think they are all spineless hypocrites, only the members that count. There are doubtless millions among the Republican electorate who actually care about fiscal responsibility, even during 2017 and 2018.
Think tanks certainly care about fiscal responsibility. For example, The Heritage Foundation called the Republican-controlled Congress (and Trump) “myopic” with regard to the budget and spending (Boccia, 2018). A piece on the CATO Institute’s website said the budget policy “makes no economic sense” and was “utterly irresponsible” (Bourne, 2018).
Where does this $4 trillion number come from? I can’t read the article because the website blocks me. The real number is about $2.5 trillion if you count from Trump’s inauguration to now.
The quote form this site: “In total, we estimate legislation signed by the President will have added $4.1 trillion to the debt between 2017 and 2029.”
So, the OP’s cite is a little misleading. It says, “the president has added an estimated $4.1 trillion to the country’s debt within his first two and a half years in office.”
There is a big difference between “has added” and “will have added” especially when talking about something as complex and confusing as the national debt.
It seems to be fairly common to describe the costs of government programs over a ten-year span. From Trump’s inauguration in 2017, to ten years from today, is probably why someone would choose to use 2017-2029. As long as they’re not counting anything twice, and they use the same rules when comparing different presidents, I think it’s fair.