 No Time For Rewards As almost everyone in the political media predicted - including us - the Senate passed a stinker of a budget bill Wednesday afternoon and promptly sent it to President Obama to be signed.
Outdoing even our prediction on Wednesday and before the President had even signed the bill, both politicians and members of the media were already congratulating each other on cable TV on Wednesday afternoon, for finally accomplishing a budget bill. As we'd stated bluntly early Wednesday morning, and Ezra Klein reiterated Wednesday afternoon, just because Democrats and Republicans were able to come to a deal, that isn't necessarily a good thing.
For millions of retired service members, the budget bill really puts the screws to them - not to mention the millions of Americans who are about to get their long-term unemployment insurance cut off as a "gift" from Congress, since neither side could come to an agreement on that issue.
To make things worse for both the unemployed and the retired service members that the budget bill screws over, since the unemployment rate has fallen to 7% - a good thing - the Fed decided to follow through with their planned tapering off of stimulus funds over the next few months. That action, in the short term, will likely increase interest rates for everyone in America just a bit next year.
In short, this is no time for applause or rewards, at least for Congress, regardless of what some of our colleagues are saying.
Then again, this budget issue isn't the only topic our media colleagues are getting wrong right now... |
