Budget Blues

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David Applegate

David Applegate is one of seven children of a farmer’s daughter who survived childhood pneumonia, the Great Depression, the Great Ohio River Flood of 1937, the loss of the family farm, and World War II.His father, the son of a railroader, dropped out of school after the ninth grade, joined the Army to fight the Nazis at the age of fifteen, and was later buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.David worked his way through high school and college as a seasonal farmworker and laborer before heading off to law school, where he began his legal career by handling employment discrimination cases for the State of Illinois.Today he is a partner in a Chicago law firm, and has been honored by the Judges of the Northern District of Illinois and the Federal Bar Association for his continuing and career-long commitment to handling employment discrimination and prisoner’s rights cases as a volunteer attorney for no fee.

Latest posts by David Applegate (see all)

• The Presidential Election Was Hacked, All Right – By the Truth - December 18, 2016
• The Court Cops Out - May 20, 2016
• The Progressive War on Free Speech – Part Three - April 20, 2016

“Man bites dog” is news, runs an old adage, but “Dog bites man” is not.  Yet “Democrats pass 1^st budget since ‘09” still made headlines over the weekend and it is hard to tell into which category it fits.

It should go without saying that in a two century-old republic the government passing a budget should not be news.  Doing so should be the first duty of a financially responsible legislature; living within it should be the second.   But this is the first time in the current administra­tion that the United States Senate – the self-styled “world’s greatest deliberative body” – has taken the first step, and it will likely never take the second.

For the bad news about this “budget” is everywhere else:  it passed with a bare 50-49 majority at 4:38 a.m. on a Saturday morning in March, with no Republicans in favor and five Democrats defecting; it will never be reconciled with the considerably different budget that a Republican House passed earlier this month; and even if enacted it would authorize higher taxes and a record $3.7 trillion in spending.

Yet even in a nation staggering under record debts and deficits, Senators somehow found the money to pay for carry-out in pizza (for the Democrats) and barbecue (for the Republicans) for their all-night session and to hire cars to drive them home.

So man bites dog, or dog bites man, and the era of irresponsible spending and continuing resolutions continues.  One wonders:  how long?

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