Congress Needs to Pass a Spending Plan to Prevent a Government Shutdown

Photo credit: angela n., CC BY 2.0.

Now that they’ve passed the tax bill, the next step for Congress is preventing a government shutdown.

They have until midnight on Friday.

Currently the House is working on passing a continuing resolution (“CR”) that, as far as I can tell, is a short-term budget (or “spending plan”) designed to keep the government going long enough for Congress to create a longer-term budget. After it passes the House, it has to pass the Senate, etc. etc. etc.

Oh, and Paul Ryan wants us to know that this time, everything is above board. As CNBC reports:

“We’re just bringing a clean, what we call vanilla CR — no games, no sneaky things. Just a continuing resolution to get us through this moment to get us into next year,” House Speaker Paul Ryan told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “It’s as clean and simple as possible.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m not too thrilled with the implications behind “sneaky things.” (Is Speaker Ryan suggesting that our elected representatives often operate sneakily?)

Anyway, I don’t mean to spend every afternoon recapping the day’s political news, but it’s all been finance-related recently and I really wanted to share that Paul Ryan quote. Let’s hope they get that CR passed so I can write about something else.

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