Washington's Budget Onion

[Geee]

American Spectator:

Unraveling Washington's budget drama is a lot like peeling an onion. That's because Washington keeps adding layers to it. It's not about what's happening next, it's about everything happening at once and seemingly, continuously. If you thought budget politics confusing and confounding before, look at where things stand after the Super Committee's failure and the belated passage of the annual funding bills.

The first layer of the budget onion is the just-completed annual appropriations process. These programs are funded only for a year at a time. Washington's fiscal year begins on October 1, and without legislation for new funding, the government shuts down. Washington is supposed to enact on time twelve separate bills to fund the government. Of course, it rarely does -- only three had been enacted before last Friday -- so Washington frequently sidesteps that deadline with its old standby the "continuing resolution."

Commonly known as a "CR," this is stopgap funding allowing negotiators to buy time to reach agreement on full year funding. Washington has enacted several this year alone -- each time reaching the last minute of the last one before taking the next step of enacting the next one.
Of course, the fight just over quickly will resume again next year.

If all this deadline-defying sounds familiar, it should. It's the same fight that began the year. From there, it spilled into the summer's debt limit increase debate -- which then spilled into more CRs.

And all this stays resolved for barely the blink of an eye The President's next budget will come out early in 2012 and an agreement on annual spending will again have to be reached by October 1 -- less than 10 months away.

There are now two important differences with past history however. First, as with any fight -- including fiscal ones -- the longer they go, the more acrimonious they get. So, expect the rematches to get progressively tougher.