The Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) has come out against bipartisan spending restraint. The BPC has issued a report highly critical of the sequestration spending cuts that were agreed to in the bipartisan Budget Control Act of 2011.
The BPC is a center-left thinktank in Washington that houses some very good policy scholars. The goal of the group is to celebrate “times in American political history when two sides have come together in the interest of the country and the people.”
Surely that describes the Budget Control Act. The Act made some modest progress at trimming the giant federal budget deficit, which is an important concern of BPC scholars. The Budget Control Act passed the House 269 to 161 with 174 Republicans and 95 Democrats in favor. It passed the Senate 74 to 26. President Obama signed it. What could be more bipartisan than that?
However, the BPC complains that the sequester will cause “immense pain, disruption, and uncertainty,” and it could “cost the economy more than one million jobs” from the supposedly negative “multiplier effects.” But that’s not what happened the last time we had bipartisan spending restraint in Washington, which was in the 1990s. Federal spending fell from 22 percent of GDP to 18 percent during that decade, and the economy boomed.
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