Saturday night, President Joe Biden’s representative and House Speaker Kevin McCarty agreed in principle on increasing the US debt ceiling by some $4 trillion over two years. This averted another “default crisis” that would have allegedly caused all kinds of nasty things to happen. READ BREAKING: Debt Ceiling Deal Reached by Biden, McCarthy – Agreement in Principle.
Speaker McCarty was on Fox News Sunday this morning explaining the deal. The official line is that in return for a two-year debt ceiling increase, spending will be held flat in FY2024 and reduced in 2025.
Texas Representative and Freedom Caucus member Chip Roy sees the deal as 0.
The deal scraps $131 billion in cuts to return bureaucracy to pre-COVID levels in favor of keeping spending at the 2023 Omnibus spending bill. Work requirements are abandoned for Medicaid. Biden’s “Inflation Reductions Act,” which Goldman Sachs says costs $1.2 trillion, is retained. The REINS Act is abandoned. Biden’s unlawful student loan bailout is punted back to the courts. The IRS keeps its 87,000 new agents. You’ll hear about the $2 billion cut from the IRS this year, but that is from their proposed budget increase. It doesn’t cut that agency. The only bright light is that the deal claws back $29 billion in unspent COVID-19 baksheesh. Also, note that the two-year deal takes the debt ceiling off the table during an election year.
This is not the “Limit, Save, Grow” plan sold to the House GOP. This is little short of a wholesale capitulation to Biden and a forfeiture of McCarthy’s duty to the people who gave him a house majority. Biden gets to keep all of his COVID spending as a budget baseline. He gets to use our money to rescue his supporters from the stupid college loan decisions they made. More than that, there is no guarantee that Biden will keep any of his promises about reducing spending next year, and with a debt ceiling already locked in, the GOP has zero leverage. So we get a “deal.”
All-in-all, it casts Biden in the role of Wimpy in this immortal gag from Popeye.
And McCarthy plays the role of the guy reaching into the nation’s pocket to pay for it.
The fact that much of the media is selling this as a win-win or a win for McCarthy (see MSNBC Throws the Goalposts Into the Ocean to Defend Biden on the Debt Ceiling Deal) is a sure sign that the nation got f***ed without receiving even the passing courtesy of a chaste peck on the cheek.