On Friday’s “PBS NewsHour,” New York Times columnist David Brooks stated that while he thinks it’s a good thing that a government shutdown is likely to be avoided, the government has just been passing “emergency spending bills that seem to have no sense of priorities, which any normal organization would have” and just passing out money “without any sort of mind behind it.”
Brooks said, “The good news is, I don’t think the government will shut down. We went through that period starting, I guess, in ’95, where there were a series of government shutdowns. I think both parties have concluded that that really hurts them both. The country just hates it when the government shuts down, and it’s really hurt whoever is blamed for that. So, I don’t think — I think they will muddle through. The bad part is, we’re muddling.”
He added, “And so, we have a government which is essentially run by path dependency. We take — whatever we were spending on last year, we’ll just do that again. And so, you don’t see a lot of adaptation. You don’t see a lot of dynamism. You just see these emergency spending bills that seem to have no sense of priorities, which any normal organization would have, no sense of, well, we should [budget], send money over here, rather than over there. And so, it’s just the constituencies that have been getting the money are getting more of the money, but without any sort of mind behind it. And so, it’s government by kludge, if that’s a word.”
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