Nothing So Permanent...

They shut down the government.

Again

Sorta, but not really, because “essential” stuff doesn’t get halted, Social Security and other handouts continue, and you and I will barely notice any disruption. Still, 750K Federal workers are on furlough, and they will, as usual, eventually get paid whatever salaries and wages they didn’t receive during the shutdown (for work they didn’t do).

And for what?

One of the Dems’ demands is an extension of COVID era Affordable Care Act subsidies that are scheduled to expire at the end of the year. That the expiration is being portrayed as a doomsday event tells us a lot. As WSJ’s James Freeman notes, they are fighting to preserve subsidies for the wealthy users of ACA, subsidies that prop up the imploding disaster that is ObamaCare.

We could call out the Democrats for doing what they constantly accuse others of - pursuing tax cuts for the rich - but really, when was the last time accusing a politician of hypocrisy ever worked?

I’m sure none of the Dems’ lapdogs in the legacy media will tell their (dwindling numbers of) faithful any of this, and I’m sure none of the Kimmels will do so either.

Then there are the provisions for providing health care to illegals, also on the “restore” list. The lapdogs tell us this claim is a lie, but lying comes as naturally as breathing to them.

This episode serves to highlight one of Milton Friedman’s many aphorisms:

Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.

Or, stated similarly, the hardest creature to kill in all creation is an on-going government program. This is why baseline budgeting - a practice that includes writing planned increases into a budget and then claiming reductions in those increases are cuts - is such a scourge. This is why sunsetting provisions sound like great compromises when impasses are reached on new spending, but really aren’t. This is why it’s so difficult to cut spending, to cut even the most useless programs, and to make any significant moves toward taming our runaway deficits and our mind-boggling national debt.

This is why the most important lesson I can hope to offer readers of this blog is that government is always and forever driven by Other People’s Money.

How long this shutdown lasts is anybody’s guess. I figure it’ll be based on measuring the political winds and trying to figure out which party is getting the bulk of the blame. Will the Dems blink or will the Repubs cave?

I don’t know, but I do know that even if the GOP wins this skirmish, that which will be passed will still be fiscally reckless and offer little hope of future sanity.

One bit of potentially good news (though I’m not holding my breath) comes from the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russ Vought. His office has directed agencies to plan for some permanent firings should the shutdown go on a while, and while I don’t know the legal intricacies involved (and I’m sure different sources will have vastly different opinions and I’m sure that there will be a zillion lawsuits), even the glimmer of hope that this shutdown enables some paring back of the bloated government workforce puts a smile on my face.