Monday, August 1, 2011

The debt deal...caps / allowances.

The bill is available in pdf format, downloadable from the House's website here.

Allowances / Caps:
  • Wars, or as Congress likes to call it, " overseas contingency operations / global war on terrorism" are outside of the discretionary funding limits, if Congress and the President agree.  An incentive to make war, it seems...or if you follow the subtlety of the exclusion, it's the Bush Wars all over again, where these budgetary items are once again off the books.
  • Disaster funding authorization cannot exceed the past 10 year average excluding the lowest and highest years.  Hate to see what happens in those bad years in the next decade.
  • Social Security Continuing Disability Review (every 3 years your disability is reviewed and either continued or closed) exists outside of the discretionary caps, but is limited by dollar amounts.  In 2012, that amount is $623M, by 2012, that amount is $1.3B.  That is to say, only if Congress and the President approves of these amounts and increases, will these dollar limits apply.
  • Heath care fraud and abuse control, similarly to SS Continuing Disability Review, is outside of the budgetary caps, but has fixed dollar limits that gradually increase each year.
  • Caps total discretionary spending (defense and non-defense) for the next 10 years.  In the next two years, funding is flat at 0.03%, but the subsequent year (2014) spending is increased to 1.8%, and rises progressively each year to 2.1% by 2021.
That's just a portion of the entire bill.  Imagine lawmakers trying to make sense of this bill, have to go through and analyze each section, weighing its pros and cons.  Or more likely, they'll just vote on partisan lines.

Those exclusions from the discretionary and nondiscretionary spending will drive Tea Party members angry.  The disaster funding limits has got to freak out the Midwestern and Southern states' governors, all of whom will likely see increases of large natural disasters as climate change accelerates the amount of vapor in the atmosphere.

Sorry, but this compromise bill is not exactly a shoo-in, just by looking at the caps / allowances portion.

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