The Debt Ceiling

This is starting to get serious. Kevin McCarthy has put a proposal on the table which Biden and company have called not serious.

If these two guys were serious about actually governing the country then I think there's a reasonable compromise here.

McCarthy wants to roll back to 2022 Discretionary Spending. The Discretionary Spending budget in 2022 was $1.722 trillion. The President's 2023 proposal is $1.748 trillion. That's a difference or $26 billion or 1.5% of the new budget proposal. Are these people seriously telling me that they can't resolve 1.5% in Discretionary Spending?

The biggest chunk of Discretionary Spending is Defense which was $751 billion in 2022. Other than that there really isn't a single big chunk of money but we're only talking 1.5%.

Note that Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and SNAP are not part of Discretionary Spending and wouldn't be affected by this part of McCarthy's proposal. All of these items are part of Mandatory Spending. Some of McCarthy's other proposals are more questionable. - Stricter work requirements. McCarthy wants to raise the age limit for SNAP recipients from 49 to 55. I don't see a problem with this considering most people work well into their 60s and many are forced to work into their 70s because Social Security doesn't provide enough to live on.

- Take back unspent Covid-19 relief funds. Offhand I don't see a problem with this either.

- Cancel the IRS budget increase. This would be just dumb. It will pay for itself and McCarthy should be embarrassed to make such a demand. I suspect that this is here to appease the Freedom Caucus.

- Cancel Green Energy incentives. This also sounds to me like it's a foolish thing to do. Green Technology is the future and even the oil companies should have figured that out by now.

- Cancel the $400 billion loan forgiveness program. Biden will never do this. Why not just let the SCOTUS have its say? If someone can convince them that the plaintiffs actually have standing I suspect they'll kill it. But it's not clear the court is convinced they have standing so this is a good gamble for both sides. This is also probably in there to make the Freedom Caucus happy. So negotiate. Work out the 1.5% reduction, accept the raised age requirement and taking back the Covid funds in exchange for letting the IRS budget increase and Green Energy incentives stay. Let the loan forgiveness plan play out in the courts. With Democratic support McCarthy doesn't need the Freedom Caucus.