On Friday, February 21, former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg posted: “A defining policy battle is about to come to a head in this country. The Republican budget will force everyone—especially Congress and the White House—to make plain whether they are prepared to harm the rest of us in order to fund tax cuts for the wealthiest.”
Buttigieg was referring to the struggle at the heart of much of the political conflict going on right now: How should the U.S. raise money, and how should it spend money?
Generally, Democrats believe that the government should raise money by levying taxes according to people’s ability to pay them, and that the government should use the money raised to provide services to make sure that everyone has a minimum standard of living, the protection of the laws, and equal access to resources like education and healthcare. They think the government has a role to play in regulating business; making sure the elderly, disabled, poor, and children have food, shelter and education; maintaining roads and airports; and making sure the law treats everyone equally.
Generally, Republicans think individuals should be able to manage their money to make the best use of markets, thus creating economic growth more efficiently than the government can, and that the ensuing economic growth will help everyone to prosper. They tend to think the government should not regulate business and should impose few if any taxes, both of which hamper a person’s ability to run their enterprises as they wish. They tend to think churches or private philanthropy should provide a basic social safety net and that infrastructure projects are best left up to private companies. Civil rights protections, they think, are largely unnecessary.
But the Republicans are facing a crisis in their approach to the American economy. The tax cuts that were supposed to create extraordinarily high economic growth, which would in turn produce tax revenue equal to higher taxes on lower economic growth, never materialized. Since the 1990s, when the government ran surpluses under Democratic president Bill Clinton, tax cuts under Republican presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, along with unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have produced massive budget deficits that, in turn, have added trillions to the national debt.
Now the party is torn between those members whose top priority is more tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations, and those who want more tax cuts but also recognize that further cuts to popular programs will hurt their chances of reelection.
That struggle is playing out very publicly right now in the Republicans’ attempt to pass a budget resolution, which is not a law but sets the party’s spending priorities, sometimes for as much as a decade, and is the first step toward passing a budget reconciliation bill which can pass the Senate without threat of a filibuster.
Under the control of Republicans, the House of Representatives was unable to pass the appropriations bills necessary to fund the government in fiscal year 2025. The government has stayed open because of “continuing resolutions,” measures that extend previous funding forward into the future to buy more time to negotiate appropriations. The most recent of those expires on March 14, putting pressure on the Republicans who now control both the House and the Senate to come up with a new funding package. But first, both chambers have to pass a budget resolution. (continued)