Today's lesson is a short excursion into the dismal science and black art of congressional budgeting and why there was not a single stimulus, but multiple "stimuli" passed since 2007 -- which account for most of our yearly $1.4 trillion spending deficit. In 1974, a Democrat-dominated Congress in the throes of Watergate passed the Congressional Budget Act of 1974. Among other things, the act established the Congressional Budget Office and codified the notion of baseline budgeting. A budgetary baseline increases about 6% per year. Any expenditure less than that 6% yearly increase is portrayed as a budget cut by Democrats and their media lackeys. One of the games played by Democrats under this law is the passage of stimulus bills. When a stimulus is passed, it adds immediately to the budget baseline for that year and then for every succeeding year. So the Obama-Pelosi-Reid stimulus passed in 2009 added $787 billion of new spending to the federal budget in 2009. It then went on to add...(Read Full Post)