Mark Sanford Wants Tighter Debt Controls …

LEGISLATION SEEKS TO PROVIDE GREATER “ACCOUNTABILITY” OVER DEFICIT SPENDING

|| By FITSNEWS || U.S. Rep. Mark Sanford is eager to win back fiscal conservatives angry with him for supporting liberal U.S. Speaker of the House John Boehner – and for selling them out on the crony capitalist U.S. Export-Import Bank.

Well … he wants to win some of them back.  He’s obviously not interested in winning us back.

Anyway, this week Sanford is touting legislation which would ostensibly provide “control and accountability” over America’s deficit spending addiction.

Would it really, though? Eh …

Sanford’s so called “Debt Limit Control and Accountability Act of 2015” would prevent the U.S. Treasury Department from temporarily stopping some payments it will eventually have to make – an accounting gimmick used to artificially lower deficit spending in the short term.

It would also express “the sense of Congress” that the U.S. debt limit should not be suspended.

Would Sanford’s legislation actually prevent such suspensions?  No …

“Sense of Congress” resolutions are like opinions.  And opinions are like … well … you know.

The debt limit is currently $17.8 trillion, although the national debt currently stands at $18.2 trillion.

So yeah … so much for a limit, right?

Four years ago the federal government passed what we referred to at the time as the “debt dereliction deal” – a colossal failure to rein in the federal government’s unsustainable growth.  Two years ago it passed the so-called “fiscal cliff” deal – yet another perpetuation of this unsustainable expansion.

In the first deal, Congress agreed to $2.4 trillion in new deficit spending – a total which was exhausted in only seventeen months – in exchange for $2.1 billion in so-called “cuts” over a ten year period.  It was a terrible deal – even if lawmakers kept their word on the spending reductions.

Have they?  Hell no …

Look, we give credit to Sanford for demanding a true accounting of what’s actually being spent in Washington, D.C. – but until he starts consistently advocating the sort of principled free market conservatism he practiced from 1995-2001, we’ve got little use for him.

Also this legislation strikes us as vintage Sanford – in that it’s more concerned with winning an intellectual debate over an issue than actually doing something to stop the root problem causing the issue in the first place.

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