Stopgap Budget Bill Shows Compromise, but Misguided Congressional Priorities (ContributorNetwork)

COMMENTARY | The gap between Republicans and Democrats isn't impassable after all. Early on Thursday the House of Representatives voted 298-121 to approve $130.4 billion in federal spending cuts, before the bill passed 70-30 in the Senate. After easily passing through Congress, President Barack Obama signed the bill into law, giving a 2012 budget for five Cabinet-level agencies, along with numerous state and local agencies and NASA. The budget is the first step towards creating a leaner government, but will only reduce federal spending by about 0.5 percent ($700 million), according to a Washington Post report.

The bill beat a Friday deadline to make progress on the United States' budget conundrum and gives lawmakers until Dec.16 to find more spending cuts or have a government shutdown further blacken Congress' name in the court of public opinion. However, the programs that will lose funding as a result of this new budget may make the tarnishing of our nation's lawmakers inevitable.

While food aid programs like food stamps and school lunch received a budget increase, many of the approved cuts will severely defund and outright end many public programs, according to a report done by Federal Times. The bill contained provisions to cut $819 million of funding for the maintenance and operation of low-income housing complexes; and remove $296 million from the Justice Department's Community Oriented Police Service program to free up more funds for the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the Bureau of Prisons.

The bill also contained measures to slash millions of funding earmarked for a program that provided incentives for farmers to not allow pollution to runoff from their lands into water supplies. It will also take millions from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is charged with overseeing and regulating the $3 trillion derivatives market and the practice of the complex financial transactions called, "swaps," which were partially to blame for the 2008 global financial crisis.

Congressional priorities seem to be with keeping law enforcement agencies, afloat, allowing more deregulation of the financial sector, allowing environmental pollution, and maintaining prisons instead of housing projects. Lawmakers blamed the harsh cuts on a "challenging budget environment;" a day after President Obama announced plans to station 2,500 U.S. Marines in Australia and allocate funds to ensure the United States remained a "Pacific power."

Thursday's stopgap budget bill averted a partial government shutdown, and put the onus on the 12 member congressional "supercommittee" to strike a deal to avoid activating the $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts outlined in August's debt-ceiling compromise. But it also reveals what Congress' true concerns are, now that U.S. lawmakers can no longer afford to show their voters that they're concerned with everything.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/obama/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ac/20111119/us_ac/10477039_stopgap_budget_bill_shows_compromise_but_misguided_congressional_priorities

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