After Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi reached a tentative agreement on spending levels, the White House -- or more specifically Trump's Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney -- demanded that House Democrats come up with $150 billion in spending cuts to accompany the bill.
At the time, I casually speculated that Trump would side with Mnuchin over his toady Mick and that appears to have been correct.
Trump is now urging House Republicans to support the Mnuchin-Pelosi deal which will increase defense and non-defense spending by a considerable amount.
The agreement — hammered out during weeks of negotiations between Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Mnuchin — will raise spending for the Pentagon and domestic programs by $320 billion while suspending the debt ceiling until at least July 31, 2021.
GOP leaders are adamant that the increase in domestic funding is not nearly as important as the huge Pentagon boost. Mnuchin argued to Senate Republicans that the agreement was as good as Republicans can get with Democrats in charge of the House. And as Treasury secretary, winning a two-year debt ceiling increase was an important achievement.
There doesn't appear to be any doubt on either side of the aisle that the alternative to this deal is another government shutdown and a possible breach of the national debt ceiling. And no one wants that.
You know, no one except maybe the Batshit Caucus. And Rand Paul.
The next president is going to take office possibly during a recession and with a deficit of at least $1 trillion (if not as high as $1.2 trillion) before they've done anything at all.
But that's inevitable, isn't it? The next president is going to have a terrible mess to clean up and raising taxes to do it will be absolutely necessary.