According to The Washington Post’s Robert Costa,
Speaker John Boehner might use the upcoming vote on increasing the
debt limit
to jack up veteran’s benefits.
At the top of the list: a proposal to link a one-year extension
of the debt ceiling to a restoration of recently cut military
benefits.
What are we talking about here? Well, by the terms of the most
recent budget deal – the one that busted the sequester cuts from a
couple of summers ago –
payments for military retirement benefits are supposed to
increase from around $51 billion this year to about $64.3 in 2023.
That’s a pretty hefty boost, of course, but not as big as was once
envisioned. At one point, the benefits were supposed to grow to
about $67.5 billion in 2023.
So now the Republicans – the party of small government, of
fiscal conservatism, of budgetary discipline – are mulling over
insisting on spending more money as a condition of raising the debt
ceiling, whose point is to call attention to deficit spending.
Any questions about why spending ratchets up but never seems to
swing back down? Read it and weep:
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