budget – Coffee Spoons

What Is Infrastructure?

This morning I read a piece in Politico Playbook that broke down President Biden’s $2.25 trillion proposal for infrastructure spending. A thing generally regarded as the United States sorely needs. $2.25 trillion is a lot of money and it’s a fair question to ask whether all that money is really money for infrastructure.

Because, it turns out, it’s not.

Please, sir, may I have more train money?

That isn’t to say money spent on job retraining or home care services wouldn’t be money well spent. Rather, it’s just not infrastructure.

But politics and the English language is a topic for another day. Oh wait, somebody already did write about that.

Credit for the piece is mine.

Continuing Resolutions

The Senate reached a compromise on a two-year budget that increases spending by nearly half a trillion dollars on both the military and domestic programmes. This comes after a series of continuing resolutions, which are temporary spending bills that allow the government to function when the fiscal year has begun, but a budget has not been set.

It should pass the Senate, but there are questions about whether House Republicans will pass the budget because of their concerns about adding to the deficit. If it does pass, it could mark a significant step forward in getting the fiscal house in order.

To see just how chaotic the use of continuing resolutions has been, thankfully we have a piece from FiveThirtyEight exploring that issue. Spoiler: we have used it a lot since the late 1990s.

My favourites are when they are used instead of a budget…

Credit for the piece goes to Gus Wezerek.

If the Government Were a Household

One of the things that irritates me about when people complain about government spending is the comparison against household budgeting. The two are very different. I mean on the surface, I suppose yes, both have income and both spend on stuff and services. But, to put it all in context there is this nice piece from the Washington Post that shows what US federal government monthly spending looks like from the perspective of a household earning $64k.

I wish I could get away with that level of spending on housing and transportation…

Credit for the piece goes to the Washington Post graphics department.