The
good news from Congress this week is that it looks like the U.S. government isn’t going to have to shut down again due
to partisan political bickering. Last
week, literally at the last minute, on the day that current funding provisions
would have expired, the U.S. House of Representatives created a new government
funding bill that will keep the lights on until September of 2015. The narrow 219-206 vote also gave the Senate
a grace period until Monday to approve the legislation dubbed “CRomnibus” before everybody goes home for the holidays. The Senate followed suit and sent the bill to
the President for signature on Monday.
In
all, the spending legislation comes to 1,603 pages, and both Democrats and
Republicans seem to be unhappy about it—for,
of course, very different reasons. But
when you get past the immigration and health care reform debate on the right,
and the rollback of Dodd-Frank provisions that would have barred Wall Street
firms from using taxpayer-backed funds to engage in risky derivative trading
that angered politicians on the left, the bill really doesn’t have much of an effect on most of
us. It keeps domestic spending
essentially flat at $1.013 trillion, while providing additional funds to fight
Islamic state militants in the Middle East and the Ebola outbreak in West
Africa. There are no new taxes, and
enforcement of the current taxes is likely to be less stringent after the
Internal Revenue Service’s budget was cut by $345.6 million—roughly what it costs to hire 5,000
auditors. Also defunded: the
Environmental Protection Agency, whose budget has been rolled back to 1989
levels. And a specific provision will
prevent the Fish and Wildlife Service from adding a Western bird called the
sage grouse to the protected species list.
Perhaps
the most interesting provision in the House-passed bill, which is not mentioned
in the press anywhere, can be found in Section 979, where our lawmakers set
salaries and expenses of the House of Representatives at a highly
budget-conscious $1.18 billion, with a “b”.
Now
the House and Senate will spend a few days debating whether to pass extensions
of 55 different tax credits, including tax deductions for research and
development expenses by U.S. corporations, tax credits for renewable energy
production plants, and a provision that would exempt forgiven mortgage debt
from taxable income.
