RUSH: I, of course, was all over the audio sound bites. From the floor of the House of Representatives to all over the country, they’re talking about El Rushbo. And my bill passed! Louie Gohmert, congressman, Texas, actually took a bill to the floor of the House to eliminate baseline budgeting, and it passed the House of Representatives. Three cheers for Louie Gohmert! And on the floor of the House when Louie is talking about his bill, he credits me for even explaining what it was before he ran for Congress.
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RUSH: Last night on the House floor was the debate on the federal budget. Louie Gohmert, congressman, Texas, has proposed a bill that would wipe out baseline budgeting. Eliminate it. Baseline budgeting essentially is every year, every line item in the federal budget automatically increases to five to ten, 8%. Just it’s built in, has no relationship to any reality. No relationship to what was spent in prior years. No relationship to whether or not the money’s being wasted. None whatsoever. It’s called the Current Services Baseline, and it always goes up. This is how an increase in spending can end up being called a “cut.” If a line item is scheduled to increase by 8%, according to the baseline, and the actual spending proposed on that line item calls for a 4% increase instead of 8%, the Democrats and the media harp on it and say, “That’s a 4% cut! That’s a 4% cut in spending,” when nothing’s been cut. It’s increasing by 4%. Louie Gohmert authored a piece of legislation to get rid of the Current Services Baseline as a budget technique, to wipe out baseline budgeting — and it passed. It passed 235 to something. It won’t go anywhere in the Senate, probably. But it did pass in the House, and this is Louie Gohmert on the House floor last night.
GOHMERT: Back during my days when I was a judge, I heard a guy named Rush Limbaugh bring up: Why do we have this automatic increase, because then when conservatives try to slightly decrease the amount of increase, they’re said to be making Draconian cuts. Well, I made a mental note. When I got to Congress in January of ’05, I couldn’t believe to find out that we still had those automatic increases every year.
RUSH: And I think baseline budgeting, the Budget Reform Act of… Something tells me 1979. It might have been post-Watergate. That’s why every spending cut deal under a balanced budget proposal is meaningless. It was 1974. It was post-Watergate. The 1974 Congressional Budget Reform Act that started all this in the first place. We will never, ever get to a balanced budget as long as this exists because every spending cut — everything that’s called a “cut” — is an increase. Except what Obama’s doing to the military. Those are genuine cuts. Everything else in the budget every year that is said to be a cut, is not. It is an increase of something.
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RUSH: Folks, we’re gonna put an article — a little page from the Limbaugh Letter from an issue from last year — up on RushLimbaugh.com pretty soon. I just sent it up to Koko, and it is a thorough treatise on baseline budgeting. It takes the complex and makes it understandable. We ran it last year in an issue of the Limbaugh Letter.
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