"Oh, get the budget done now because the elections are coming" -- Opinion piece on Fox.
Uh, did someone just find a calendar or something?
What have I been talking about since the election itself? The calendar and how it plays into what you move in timing, if you can, is fixed -- we all know when the next election is out to infinity, right? Yeah, we do.
So if you had to bet your house (not the House but your own), you’d be well advised to expect a Democratic Speaker behind President Trump at the 2027 State of the Union. House Speaker Mike Johnson sits atop a narrow GOP majority as it is, and history’s tide is running against him, so things will have to break just right for him to hold on to the gavel. (Johnson does have the support of President Trump and so endangered House incumbents will be begging 45-47 to campaign in their districts.)
Correct and that is a monstrous problem because if the GOP loses the House in 2026, and both the calendar and history suggest they will, so you have to counterbalance that "natural tendency" somehow or you're very likely to get drubbed Trump's last two years will be all sound, furor and no movement on anything that requires Congressional approval.
Like, for instance, a budget.
Further, given the stresses in the economy in general, which are centered in housing and medical care on a cost basis you cannot address them with more "insurance schemes" whatever they might be. Insurance can only spread cost because that's what it does; it cannot reduce it and in fact the perversity of it tends to increase cost because insurance companies are limited in their operating margin by law and regulation.
Therefore if there are "X" customers to be had (e.g. all the citizens in the US in the case of health) you can try to steal competitors' business or you can find ways to increase the total amount spent, which at your 10% operating margin means the amount of money you make goes up.
Or, as I've often observed, "would you like to make 10% of $1 million or 10% of $10 million, if you can only make 10%?"
That isn't complicated and it is why insurance schemes, no matter what area they're in can never solve a cost problem and never do. People often believe they can address cost issues with insurance systems; Obama was one of them but hardly the only one. Indeed medically-related things have been the focus of such inherently-bankrupt schemes at least back to the 1970s and in fact within my own family I discovered (after death, in that the records of same were part of what I was tasked with sifting through and which I was formerly unaware) an attempt to game insurance that failed, which incidentally led the person who tried it to vociferously support "no exceptions insurance" coverage for quite-literally the rest of their life.
If you attack cost in a serious way then those who benefit from said increased cost are sad because their margins compress. Some will be sad enough that their businesses fail since they built overhead-heavy systems that can't operate without that artificially-imposed cost on the end-user. This means unemployment goes up temporarily, which is bad for a President when it comes to election time because nobody votes for the guy that got them fired. But people do vote for the guy who got them hired especially if their compensation went up and their cost of living went down in the meantime, and quite-rapidly if you cut that excess and forcibly-imposed cost out of the population's living expenses jobs will be created and economic activity becomes more-competitive to place here in the United States -- but that adjustment will take time.
Thus you cannot be in the middle of a significant economic downturn and expect to do well in an election.
If Trump and his advisors think we can go through the entire next two years without any hiccups and simply rah-rah through the election on the premise of "happy days are here again" when budgets at the consumer level are stretched enough that Seniors and Juniors alike are all having trouble being able to pay the rent they are missing a couple of cans in their sixpacks.
If a correction in the balance of these things must happen, and I argue it indeed must and it must be very significant (which means people will get fired while the adjustment takes place) you had better not have it happen into the months before an election or the odds of you getting drubbed are nearly 100%.
Thus the correct action is to take the damage now when (1) you have time to be on the recovery side before people vote and (2) you can still blame the old guy for it (it doesn't matter if that's true or not, incidentally, although in this case it at least partially is.)
So yes, this opinion is correct -- but the why is wrong. Its not about budgets per-se, although that's certainly part of it.
Its that compressing the arms of the "K" shaped economy has to happen in order to restore balance and while this is the exact opposite of the path the economy has been on for the last 20 years the people on lower end of that "K" cannot bear any more of that pressure and since they are much more-numerous than those on the top arm you better solve this or you will pay for it when the election comes -- and come it will.