Rep. Mulvaney rips GOP budget farce

[Brian4Liberty]

Republican rips GOP over budgets (http://thehill.com/policy/finance/237353-republican-rips-gop-over-budgets)
By Rebecca Shabad - 03/30/15


Conservative Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.) is bashing his GOP colleagues for the budget blueprints that passed both chambers of Congress last week.

In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal late Sunday, Mulvaney criticized House and Senate Republicans for a provision that would allow increased defense spending without breaching spending caps imposed by a 2011 law.

“With fiscal concerns no longer in vogue, House Republicans broke the statutory caps of the Budget Control Act (BCA) and did so in a way that wasn’t honest,” Mulvaney wrote.

Republicans took the BCA and “threw it out the window,” Mulvaney said, adding, “The truth is that the GOP lost.”

Mulvaney, who serves on the House Financial Services, and Oversight and Government Reform Committees, rejected how the Republican budgets increase military spending by pumping up the Pentagon’s war fund, known as the overseas contingency operations (OCO) account.
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“The story behind the GOP budget has little to do with defending the nation. It has everything to do with the deficit. Put another way: All Republicans want a strong military; not all of us want to pay for it,” Mulvaney argued.

Mulvaney and other deficit hawks had a problem with the lack of offsets and insisted on votes on the original blueprint, which would require them, and a vote on the budget that ultimately prevailed.
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More: http://thehill.com/policy/finance/237353-republican-rips-gop-over-budgets

[Brian4Liberty]

The Republican Budget Is a Deficit Bust (http://www.wsj.com/articles/mick-mulvaney-the-republican-budget-is-a-deficit-bust-1427662664)
Defense hawks say ‘freedom isn’t free.’ They’re right. So let’s pay for it with spending cuts, not by borrowing.
By Mick Mulvaney - March 29, 2015


Last week Republicans in the House and Senate passed budgets that took the Budget Control Act of 2011 and threw it out the window. Many defense hawks think this was a win. The truth is that the GOP lost.
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More: http://www.wsj.com/articles/mick-mulvaney-the-republican-budget-is-a-deficit-bust-1427662664

[TaftFan]

By the way, Mulvaney hosts weekly Facebook chats. Thought I would put that out there.

[Brian4Liberty]

Rep. Mick Mulvaney: Hey GOP, Enough Already With the Spending Increases!


Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.) slags his own party's House members for passing a budget last week that not only increased spending totals but refused to pay for them by cutting spending elsewhere.
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But channeling his inner S.E. Hinton, that was then, writes Mulvaney, and this is now:

"Four years later, debt and deficits are passé, and the deficit is only a third of what it was just five years ago. Never mind that this year’s deficit will be the sixth-largest in history—exceeded only by the previous five—or that the national debt has ballooned by $3 trillion in that time. Today beheadings and racial tension grab the headlines.

With fiscal concerns no longer in vogue, House Republicans broke the statutory caps of the Budget Control Act and did so in a way that wasn’t honest. Instead of making the arguments for changing the law, the House budget used an off-budget fund, the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) budget, to increase military spending.

The OCO should trouble Republicans. The so-called war budget, set up when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, has been decried for years as a slush fund, and rightly so. No less a defense hawk than Sen. John McCainhas called it a gimmick. The OCO is perhaps the worst way to fund the military. It lacks oversight and accountability within a Pentagon already famous for its inability to know where the money is going."
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http://reason.com/blog/2015/03/30/rep-mick-mulvaney-hey-gop-enough-already