Congress in budget logjam

It really is beyond a joke that the two political parties in US Congress cannot make a sensible deal to maintain government spending. It has been like this for years, a total logjam over how the country's money should be spent. It all started in the Obama years and it's still continuing today under Trump. Neither president could persuade Congress to do its job and authorise expenditure like grown-ups. A total government shutdown was avoided this week with an agreement to keep spending levels going for a further two weeks. But then what? Congress is brilliant at brinkmanship, coming up with a last-minute temporary plan to avoid shutdown, but 14 days go by very quickly. It's just a fudge, something which all politicians are good at. But where is the leadership in Congress to sort this out once and for all, and where is the president who has such charismatic authority that politicians, Republican and Democrat, bow to his wishes? Obama couldn't do it and he is a pretty charismatic guy. Trump is just too divisive! So in less than two weeks, the government will once again be facing shutdown, with employees being sent home, contracts suspended and major programmes put into limbo, all days before Christmas. The omens for a longlasting deal are not looking good. The Republicans want to increase defence spending to meet Trump's promise to rebuild America's armed forces, but the Democrats want similar increases for social programmes. They also want to ensure the survival of the Obamacare health programme which Trump hates, and to safeguard the rights of the so-called Dreamers, the 700,000 immigrants without proper documentation who came to the US with their parents when they were just children. There seems little room for compromise on these huge issues, yet compromise is the only thing that will end this disastrous way of running a country's finances. All government departments suffer, perhaps particularly the Pentagon. The Defence Department can only function properly if it knows what the budget will be over the next five years, so that decisions can be made about ordering new ships, new missiles, new aircraft etc. All these mighty weapons prgrammes take years to come to fruition, and investment decisions have to be made a decade in advance. The Pentagon's planning parameters are governed by the Budget Control Act which Obama signed into law in 2011. Attemptng to slash America's huge deficit, the law effectively cut defence spending by nearly $1 trillion over ten years. The act was supposed to be a wake-up call to both Republicans and Democrats to come up with a grand new spending plan under which all programmes, social and defence, could be maintained without increasing the country's deficit of around $1.5 trillion. But since then there has been a total gridlock which passed from Obama to Trump. Military chiefs are beside themselves with frustration and anger and bewilderment. Their political bosses are incapable of resolving the differences in Congress, so they have to go from day to day, trying to work out what money there is to spend and how best to spend it. This is America, still the nation with the biggest economy in the world but one stuck in a political mess which appears to be unresolvable. Imagine a flight of Harrier jumpjets: these amazing aircraft can literally come to a halt in midair. The sensation, when the pilots put on the breaks, is like flying into a cloud of treacle. That's exactly what has been happening with the US government spending programme. It's stuck in treacle!