“We can’t keep spending money we don’t have,” said Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, where deadly wildfires have charred tens of thousands of acres and destroyed more than 1,000 homes. [...]“I think we’ve got to offset everything; anything that’s not allocated has got to be offset these days. It shouldn’t delay it,” Burr told POLITICO. “There’s hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, fraud and abuse that could be accessed like that.”
This purist principle did not stop both Cornyn and Burr for voting to fund rebuilding efforts in Iraq without a single offset. Indeed, Cornyn voted against delaying $20.3 billion in Iraq infrastructure funds even though the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) noted that such a payment would increase the budget deficit. Overall, the U.S. has spent $44.6 billion in taxpayer funds on rebuilding Iraq through emergency supplemental bills — and not a penny was cut from elsewhere in the budget.
Clearly the solution here is that we need to bomb ourselves, and then the GOP will be interested in finding money to invest in our crumbling infrastructure.
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