The thing you have to understand is that there is a HUGE amount of pressure inside the Beltway to do what's always been done. That's all this comes down to. It is very, very resistant to change of any kind -- because there's a great deal of vested interest in every nook and cranny of the federal budget.
Another line from the Politico piece is this:
And just because a budget is declared “dead on arrival” does not mean it won’t influence the budget that eventually emerges on Capitol Hill;
That's what I mean by "gravity." People can scoff and dismiss OMB budget proposals -- in fact, they do every year. It's certainly true that, in many ways, this one is very different from even every other "dead on arrival" presidential budget proposals. And I'm not unsympathetic to the criticisms against it -- particularly its optimistic growth assumptions, etc. But all of that misses the larger point.
And it's this: our "normal" policymakers have been utterly derelict for many years in tackling a major problem they ALL know exists. So they have zero credibility with me when they whine. Zero. They've had their chances. And they've steadfastly refused to take them. And how embarrassing must it be for them for an unserious, know-nothing clown like Donald Trump to come in and show them up?
I don't care that this budget proposal is a farce. I really don't. To focus on that misses the point. ALL of our (recent, anyway) budgets have been farces -- because they've all pretended that the fiscal tsunami isn't approaching....when they all know full well that it is.
There's a moral to this story: if the serious people don't want unserious people to be charting our country's future course, then they better start acting like the serious people they claim to be.
