Debt Crisis Was Bipartisan Excuse to 'Cut Social Spending,' Not Defense Budget

17:58 GMT, 12 June 2023

James Tweedie

The bipartisan deal to end the stalemate over lifting the government borrowing limit included cuts to domestic spending programs but not to the pentagon budget. Dr. Jack Rasmus, professor of economics and politics at St. Mary's College in California, argued that both parties are happy to abandon the poor in the name of arming Ukraine.

Sputnik

Democrats and Republicans have used the recent debt ceiling stand-off as a pretext for cutting social spending while inflating the military budget.

The latest threat of a US Treasury default due to wrangling over the budget between the Democrat-held White House and Republican-controlled Congress has been averted after House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden struck a deal on limited spending cuts.

But economist Dr. Jack Rasmus told Sputnik that poverty alleviation programs were the casualty of that battle, while the Pentagon's budget emerged unscathed and even boosted.

"You've got to understand that both Democrats and Republicans, a majority of them in Congress, liked the debt ceiling situation because it allows them to put pressure on social programs' spending," Rasmus said. "You know, defense spending is never affected by these deals. That always goes through. You can see it in this deal here, 11 percent in the first year increase in the Pentagon budget alone, not the other defense spending."

But the saga and its outcome was nothing new in Washington DC, the academic pointed out.

"You go back to Obama in 2011, last time we had this, and the defense spending increase just blew right through. It had no effect. They only cut a trillion dollars out of social programs spending."

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However, the Democratic leadership will be happy as the final budget deal does nothing to rein in their pet project of arming the Kiev regime for a proxy conflict with Russia.

"Biden wants a free hand to continue to give billions every week to finance the Ukraine proxy war, and he's got that free hand now," Rasmus said. "And both sides never even made an effort to do any cuts here on the defense side. So Biden got his blank check for raising Pentagon and war spending and financing Ukraine. And the Republicans got all the rest.

"So Democrats got what they wanted, at least the corporate Democrats running the party. And the Republicans got a you know, a big bite of the apple of cutting social spending," he added. "And they're going to get another bite here when it comes later in the year for passing the budget for the next year."

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