Larry Kudlow on the continuing resolution debate

Good riddance to the debt ceiling

and that’s the subject of the riff. President-Elect Donald Trump is totally right: get rid of the debt ceiling.  

Good riddance. Get rid of it altogether! Nobody pays any mind to it. It’s never enforced. All it does is open the door to mischievous Democratic attempts to threaten government shutdowns if Republicans don’t cave in to all the trillions of dollars for their ultra-liberal programs and then they blame the GOP for the shutdown. 

Mr. Trump is also right that he doesn’t want to take office with a debt limit hanging over his new administration and preventing his tax cut and border closing initiatives. In fact, keeping the toothless debt limit will interfere with the entire policy agenda of the new president. 

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Of course! That’s why Democrats love the debt ceiling. It has no meaning, but it throws a wet blanket over the fantastic Trump honeymoon that he’s enjoying. The Democratic leadership would love nothing more than to hold Mr. Trump’s entire agenda hostage, even though the voters have just given Trump an enormous mandate to change policies, end Bidenomics and move toward a new Trumpian era of peace and prosperity. 

If you ever take a look at the howling about the debt ceiling, it all comes from liberal media and liberal politicians, who never advocate for any spending restraints. Isn’t that interesting? In fact, in the current silly season debate over short term government funding and the phony debt limit, even the mild Pay-Go requirement built into the last debt limit deal in 2023 between then-Speaker McCarthy and President Biden has been thrown out the window. 

There were no spending offsets to all the crazy spending increases embodied in the fortunately now-defunct CR that went up in flames last night. What kind of spending increases? Well, here’s a few. $100 billion disaster relief, which is probably ten times more than it should be. $31 billion in farm relief – way too much. Massive new ethanol spending. The usual welfarist increases for food stamps and childcare – with no work requirements, as always. 

Another pro football boondoggle for the RFK stadium in DC. A pay raise for Congress that might be justifiable, but it’s the wrong moment for it and then stuff that probably nobody knows what it costs – like 70 pages of something called “pandemic preparedness.”

The CR would’ve buried all the J-6 committee records – kind of like a pre-emptive pardon for Liz Cheney. The only good news is that President Trump killed this continuing resolution bill. 

Hopefully he can kill the debt limit also and it’s also worth noting, that Mr. Trump is getting a lot of help from Elon Musk in all these endeavors. 

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In only a short period of time, Elon has become a major political force and it is a force for good and he’s being helped by his DOGE brother Vivek Ramaswamy, who put a sharp pencil to the profligate 1,500-page CR that fortunately was buried. 

Now, I’d like to see Elon team up with President Trump and kill the debt ceiling altogether and then, Mr. Trump and his team can embark on new “Golden Age” peace and prosperity, pressing on with their agenda to cut taxes, dismantle the regulatory state, seal the border, and “drill, baby, drill.” Let’s fatten the wallets of blue-collar working folks, rather than government politicians and bureaucrats and that’s the riff. 

This article is adapted from Larry Kudlow’s opening commentary on the Dec. 19, 2024, edition of “Kudlow.”