Freedom of Information laws were one of the greatest products of legislation ever.
There is NO budget. Obama hasn't even submitted one.
Posted at 02:50 PM ET, 04/12/2012
Apr
12, 2012 06:50 PM EDT
TheWashingtonPost
[h=1]Please kill off this budget
myth[/h]
By Jonathan
Bernstein
Federal budgeting is genuinely
complex. The process has a lot of
relatively obscure stages: There’s authorization,
appropriations, reconciliation, 302b allocations, and more. There’s something
called a “budget resolution,” which is sort of a budget, but sort of not. As I
said, it’s complicated.
Republicans have built out of
this a completely nonsensical talking point about Democrats operating without
out a budget, and it’s still, no matter how often it’s been debunked, gathering
steam. For example (
via TPM), CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo has
apparently fully bought into it, asking Gene Sperling this week “How tough has
it been operating without a budget? This administration has not had a budget in
3000 days.”
The best part of that question is that 3000 days is roughly eight years.
Alas, that presumably accidental slip of the tongue is about as accurate as the
rest of the question.
The U.S. government, of course,
is absolutely operating under a budget. The law that provided that budget even
conveniently had the word “budget” in its title: it’s the
Budget Control Act, passed by Congress and signed by the
president to end the debt limit confrontation last summer.