CE Week #3: “Under-the-radar spending” & “President’s budget is an outrage”
Bush’s order too late to impede most earmarking by Congress
Sacramento Bee
February 6, 2008
The following editorial appeared Sunday in the Sacramento Bee.
In his State of the Union address, President Bush promised “unprecedented” reform of congressional earmarking. That’s the practice through which members of Congress sneak in pork-barrel spending projects that have never received a hearing, never been debated and are not in the text of a bill.
Bush has signed an executive order instructing federal agencies to ignore all earmarks that are not in the text of a law. That’s fine; Congress should debate these projects in the open and hold a public vote. But this effort comes a little late in his presidency. It was also more than a bit lame, considering that it won’t take effect until October 2009, months after he leaves office.
Earmarking is hardly new, but the real problems with the practice were ushered in by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, after Republicans took control of the House in 1994. According to the Congressional Research Service, earmarks that year totaled 4,100. By 2000, they had risen to 6,100.
But it was during the Bush era, with Congress and the presidency in the hands of one party, that earmarks really got out of hand. By 2002, earmarks totaled 10,500, rising to a record 15,500 by 2006, more than tripling since 1994.
What changed? In addition to the traditional practice of steering earmarks to home districts, members of Congress targeted projects to out-of-district lobbyists and private firms that contributed to their political campaigns.
Rep. John Doolittle, R-Calif., is an example. After San Diego defense contractor Brent Wilkes organized fundraisers and contributions, Doolittle helped win $37 million in earmarks from 2002 to 2005 for Wilkes’ firm for technology the Defense Department hadn’t requested. This had no benefit for constituents of Doolittle’s district.
In some cases, this practice edged into bribery. Former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, R-Calif., was convicted of taking $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors in exchange for inserting earmarks into bills.
When Democrats won the House majority in 2006, they promised reform. They eliminated about 10,000 earmarks that had been proposed by the previous Congress for the 2007 budget. But that welcome change is proving short-lived. While earmarks dipped to 2,700 in 2007, they’re getting out of hand again – rising to 11,700 for the 2008 budget year. And Democrats are using loopholes to flout the spirit of new rules that are supposed to require earmarks to be in appropriation bills and open to challenge on the floor.
It is lack of public scrutiny and debate that allows stealth spending projects to divert money from real budget priorities to low-priority earmarks. The public will have to demand that Congress reverse this return to business as usual. Bush’s action comes too late to have much effect.
President’s budget is an outrage
Froma Harrop
The Providence Journal
February 6, 2008
President Bush’s budget will top $3 trillion. It envisions massive deficits for fiscal years 2008 and 2009 – nearly matching the record in 2004, when the federal budget went $412 billion into the hole.
The average American might properly ask, “Shouldn’t we at least have something to show for all this?” Even the basics are missing – for example, health coverage for all children, a serious effort against global warming, bridges that don’t fall down. Where has the money gone?
David Cay Johnston provides some answers in his angry and brilliant book, “Free Lunch.” An ace investigative reporter, Johnston explains: “From those leaves in the park to textbooks to highway bridge maintenance to food safety inspections, money is dwindling because so much has been diverted to the already rich through giveaways, tax breaks and a host of subsidies that range from the explicit to the deeply hidden.”
These diversions started in the Reagan years, according to Johnston, and Democrats have played their part. But the massive transfer of national wealth to the tippy-top became religion under Bush.
Johnston recalls Bush’s famous remarks to a white-tie crowd at the Waldorf-Astoria during his 2000 campaign. Referring to his audience as the “haves and have-mores,” he said “some people call you the elite. I call you my base.”
Bush gave the “base” some very big tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. The cuts were supposed to boost the economy and probably helped, but they never generated enough revenue to pay for themselves. When higher collections helped lower the 2005 and 2006 deficits, the administration credited tax-cutting magic. Most economists disagreed, citing an upswing in the business cycle, bolstered by a housing bubble.
And contrary to conservative legend, the Bush “reforms” did not raise the overall income tax burden of the very rich. The administration cleverly claims that the share paid by the top 40 percent is higher than it was in 2000 – which is true. It neglects to add that families at the tiny pinnacle – the top tenth of 1 percent (who made at least $1.7 million in 2005) – have seen their tax burdens decline significantly. In 2005, this group of 300,000 men, women and children made nearly as much money as all 150 million Americans in the lower half.
So the high earners below this super-elite accounted for the entire heavier burden of the top 40 percent. These are the members of the upper middle class – the doctors, lawyers and businesspeople who have to work for their money.
As Johnston brutally documents, the free-market posturing of the Bush administration is a total sham. The government has become the enricher of the already rich, not the other way around.
For the connected, government gives away public land at deep discounts. It jiggers the tax code to make moving factories to China more profitable. It undoes safety regulations that subtract from the bottom line. It weakens consumer protections, letting financial institutions prey on the unsophisticated and the not-very-bright. In fine-print legislation, it shifts risk from corporate managers onto investors and makes the taxpayer cover mistakes. There’s a reason why the number of registered lobbyists in Washington has more than doubled to 35,000 since Bush took office.
The rising cost of Medicare is troubling and must be addressed. But isn’t it interesting that Bush sees this middle-class entitlement as the budgetary outrage that needs his immediate attention? His budget would make deep cuts in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – and eliminate a $301 million program that trains pediatricians at children’s teaching hospitals.
That’s stuff for the ordinary folks. The have-mores will do just fine.
Well obviously this article connects to pork barrel spending; however, it is a rather appalling article in my opinion. Reading the facts and figures that this article has found is just down right maddening and makes the Bush administration look even worse than what it already looks like. First of all, where have all the Republican/ Conservative ideas gone? Conservatives are supposed to be either fiscally conservative, (spending less money, having less taxes and overall less government) or religiously conservative (having prayer in school, having religion be very important, anti gay, etc..). Bush appears to be neither. He does have some tax cuts, but only for the very wealthy which is a joke and so is the whole Reagan “Trickle Down” economic theory in my opinion. He came into office with a budget surplus and has now put us trillions of dollars in the hole. I mean come on, that is just ridiculous. Yes I know that there have been some crises such as 9/11 and other things but overall Bush has done nothing but piss away money down the drain. The only thing that he has done in my opinion is No Child Left Behind which is kind of a joke in itself.
This article just seems to be a personal outcry that has been published for the world to see. One of the many things that Froma Harrop harps about is the dinners that government is paying off. To me having a thirty dollar dinner doesn’t seem to bad but that is if they go to a regular restaurant What we are not told is what the average dinner cost when the government pays one off. The first price I was thinking was about thirty dollars for a dinner of two. After thinking a bit longer I thought that perhaps instead of having a thirty dollar dinner that they may be having a Fifty dollar Cinkendaggars meal. Even with all of this extra spending, if this is what they are doing, it would be incredibly hard to moderate this spending. Who would pass a bill or a resolution stating how much they could spend on a dinner. As we all know the government allow business expenses like hosting White House parties and airplane trips because our country needs these particular things to do their job. (The parties are for relations). As much this spending seems useless there are a lot more usea for the things they are paying than we see. Porkbarrel spending looks to be incredibly pointless but that is paying for the highway construction in town.
Although the second half of the article was clearly biased towards the democratic side of the spectrum, I truly think that the author had many good things to say about the status quo within our economy. Apparently, an earmark “refers to congressional provisions directing approved funds to be spent on specific projects”. This article most definitely painted earmarks with a negative connotation, and, maybe rightfully so. From my understanding, earmarks are simply appropriations bills to spend on seemingly useless projects. In other words, one could call it pork barrel spending. But not only does this article tie into pork barrel spending, but also debt, deficits, the federal budget, appropriations bills, and much of the vocabulary we have just studied.
This “trickle-down theory”, supported by many Republicans is supposed to help our economy. We keep the rich richer and keep the poor poorer. In my humble opinion, it is smack-dead immoral. That’s all there is to it. This guy that we call the president of the United States, is not looking out for our best interests. Nah, he’s looking out for his best interests. I’ll say it again: oil is the reason we’re still in Iraq. In fact, it’s the reason that we entered Iraq in the first place. Before he got into office, our debt was supposedly to become eliminated, but instead, we are sitting with 9.3 trillion dollars of debt in our hands. Whereas gas shows no signs of decreasing, our environment is deteriorating, and we are in the middle of what could become an tremendous recession, I’d agree, that yes, we are headed in the right direction. In America, 90% of the wealth is owned by the top 10% of the people. Many people cant afford health care, and many die because of it. There is no reason that our very own are dying because we instead decide to let our debt steadily rise over our heads with a pointless war, with no other intention than a profit. Only one more year, and we’ll have Obama. Woot, woot.
This is a good example of the differences between responsible, balanced investigative journalism, and journalism which uses prejudicial language to skew the reader’s perspective. Unfortunately, it is also a good example of journalism which will be overlooked, and journalism which will undoubtedly sell more papers. When you use a phrase like “angry and brilliant” to describe your only primary source, telling of how he “brutally documents” Bush’s budget, I have to take what Froma (guy? girl?) says with a grain of salt.
That aside… timing. Why the odd timing with the executive order? Is it really too late? Does an executive order carry over into the next presidency? But most importantly– is it really THAT easy to end earmarking?
Let’s speculate. Take a journey with me, using my words, so that we might find a reasoning to this. President Bush might be trying in a last ditch effort to fulfill the promise he made to the nation upon election, much like a high school student less then an hour before the due date of an assignment (disappointing, since we even gave him an extension in ‘04). No, President Bush seems to be more self interested then that. I think it ties back to legacy. Right now, he’s banking on eventually being well remembered for Iraq. But right now, he’s trying to act so unselfishly that he can ensure a semi-fond memory, just in case.
Yeah. That’s it.
First off I have to say that I completely disagree with BFreeland. Although it may appear that the second article was biased towards Democrats, which it might have little bias, the article was simply telling us the hard truth, we’ve lost lots of money, killed and have been killed and have nothing to show for it. Usually when the US goes to war we end it with a feeling like we’ve done something to help protect our Country, well maybe not Vietnam or Korea, but usually that’s the main point of a war. But it has come to many citizens of the United States that we really have nothing to show for our efforts in Iraq. We didn’t find Osama, we didn’t find and WMD’s and we sure as heck didn’t fix their government. The only thing we did find was higher gas prices; don’t even get me started on that. But the second half of this article to me made a valid point, “Where is all the money going?” Bush did nothing but increase our budget and our debt. He didn’t make anyone’s lives easier, except of course those select “have-mores.” Providing tax-cuts for the wrong people, and honestly just looking out for number one, Mr. Bush has lead our country down the wrong path. The only thing that we’ve gained is the disapproval from other countries. I may be bringing in a bit of my own personal opinion, but the main point still remains. We’re spending more money than we have and we aren’t spending it on the right things Thank goodness that a president can only have 2 terms.
Jackie,
First off, I believe that you disagree mainly with the fact that I wrote about the article being democratically biased. I could see your point, and I may have been a little too misleading with the word “obviously”, but in my opinion, it is. Now, I am a democrat, but just the way that he wrote the article, it seemed biased. Think; what kind of Republican talks about the need for better healthcare? If anything, Republicans talk about a type of health care that will benefit the wealthy. Even at the end of the article, he says, and I quote, “The have-mores will do just fine”. He, of course was alluding to the previous paragraph, whereas he was talking about Bush’s cuts of health care. This implies that he is not one of those “money-holding, super-educated, selfish, Republicans”, whereas, that is not what I truly believe to be a correct generalization of Republicans. I mean, I very easily could be wrong, but I just have the gut feeling that this guy is a democrat.
But other than the fact that I said that I believed that the article was biased towards the left wing, I do not find a disagreement in our posts. We both spoke about how idiotic the war in Iraq is/was. We both talked about how the rich continue to grow richer, and the poor poorer because of the war. The main difference that I did find between our posts, is the argument of the United States’ effectiveness in modern warfare. Now, I think that we were very successful until a certain point. Now, this point may be somewhere in the middle of the Second World War. Where have we been truly successful after that point? We have not, since then, gone into countries, dominated, and came out with few cuts and scratches. I do realize that the fact that our military continues to be greater than any other by a tenfold. But I also do recognize the fact that the rest of the world has gotten to the point where a band of ten people with weapons can be extremely dangerous, even to an American military stronghold. But I do agree that in most/all before World War Two, we came out of a war feeling a little more secure about our security. Man, that’s ironic. Anyways, good post, but I did just not see what you were disagreeing with, mainly.
The pork-barrel spending has to settle down at some point. There is no good explanation for why the earmarks have tripled in the last 12 years. I would assume that the earmarks would have gone up a little, but not that much. The author of these articles is so clearly Democrat. Sure, the earmarks started increasing with the Majority leader Tom DeLay (R), but currently we have a Democratic Majority Leader, Steny Hoyer. The idea that the earmarks are happening just because of the Republican Party doesn’t hold water. Congress, as we learned, authorizes money and then appropriates it. Being that Congress has been mostly Democratic since Bush has taken office, they are at fault too. While it may be late for Bush to do anything about the earmark spending, at least he is doing something.
The second article cannot just criticize the president. As I said before, Congress holds the purse and the president must go through them. Congress authorizes money for the budget and then decides how much should be appropriated and for what. It is no surprise that the U.S. is in debt because we are also in a war. With war comes debt, but to counter the debt higher taxes would help. There is no possible way to make up the deficit by spending more: there has to be more money coming in as revenue than leaving as expenditures. The author is harsh on the Republicans, but I don’t think that he/she [Froma] completely realizes that both the Democrats and Republicans have problems with the way they tax. Republicans need to tax the Bill Gates and Warren Buffets more, while the Democrats need to tax the haves less. I think the right amount of taxing is somewhere in between both extremes. There is definitely a problem though when Bill Gates and Warren Buffet say that they feel that they should be taxed more. If they are that worried though I think they should just donate what they feel they owe the government.
Bryan Freeland’s argument is ridiculous. The U.S. did not just invade Iraq because Bush was looking out for his best interest in oil. A statement like that should be backed up if it is going to be used. In Bush’s 2001 Iraq Speech, he said that the oil money would be distributed to the Iraqi people and their government. One of the problems is that he cannot force the Iraqi government to give oil money to their people (a huge problem in Iraq because the government is rich, yet the people are poor). The U.S. is buying oil from Iraq at market price and so everything is fair. The primary reason for entering Iraq is more because of 9/11 and the 3,000 people who died. The U.S. didn’t want to just sit around and let other attacks occur. A secondary reason, once we were in Iraq, was to gain an oil ally. Having an ally for oil would benefit the U.S. especially when Saudi Arabia isn’t exactly when of our best allies. Bush is definitely not invading Iraq just to help himself out.