CE Week #9: “Budget sham is an outrage”
Cal Thomas
Tribune Media Services
March 24, 2008
We’ve all seen or heard about them. Perhaps they are friends or family members who have demonstrated financial irresponsibility: a college student who has a budget and quickly exceeds it on wild partying; a cousin or best friend who asks for a “loan” and then never pays it back; people whose credit cards are maxed out and they can’t afford the finance charges.
Government behaves similarly, playing any or all of those roles. It now resembles an irresponsible parent, spending the children’s wages and inheritance as if there were no tomorrow. Republicans lost the spending issue – and their congressional majority – because they behaved like overspending Democrats. Now Democrats in the House are going the Republicans one better. They are promising to increase spending should they win the White House and maintain their congressional majority.
According to an analysis of the fiscal 2009 House Democratic majority’s federal budget by Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation, ( www.heritage.org), every American household would pay on average $3,100 more in federal taxes. That amounts to $1.265 trillion more over five years and $3.911 trillion over 10 years. Worse (if that’s possible), the Democratic budget proposal increases discretionary spending by 8 percent and does not eliminate even one wasteful program. It also ignores the coming explosion in the cost of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
None of these increases will be paid for by “soaking the rich” with new tax increases. That means more borrowing from countries that don’t have America’s best interest as a priority, more inflation and a weaker dollar.
The spending virus has so permeated Congress that members won’t even go on the wagon during an election year. The bipartisan DeMint-McCaskill budget amendment that would have required a one-year moratorium on earmarks was soundly defeated 71-29. This is how little respect most members have for those whose money they take through taxation, spending it like frat boys on a weekend bender.
The Washington Examiner newspaper determined that the longer someone serves in the Senate, the more likely they are to favor spending more money and to oppose any suggestion that they stop. According to the Examiner, “the average seniority of senators voting for DeMint-McCaskill was 12 years, while opponents averaged 22 years in the Senate.” All three presidential candidates returned from the campaign trail to vote for the measure. Sen. John McCain is far more credible on spending reductions than Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama and the moratorium was about slashing earmarks, not the big-ticket items most in need of reform, but getting any politician on record favoring spending reductions (and then following through to see if they mean it) is worth something.
This year, according to Heritage, the federal government will spend $25,117 per household.
The excuse one hears most often is that there is no place legislators can cut spending.
Really?
Last year, says the Heritage Foundation, the government made at least $55 billion in overpayments; the Pentagon spent almost $1 million shipping two 19-cent washers from South Carolina to Texas and $293,451 sending an 89-cent washer from South Carolina to Florida. Even the coming postal rate increases aren’t that high.
Washington spends $60 billion per year on corporate welfare compared with $50 billion on homeland security. Suburban families are receiving large farm subsidies for the grass in their backyards, subsidies that many of these families never requested and do not want. More than half of all farm subsidies go to corporate farms with average household incomes of $200,000.
And then there is my personal favorite: Government auditors spent the last five years examining all federal programs and found that 22 percent of them – costing taxpayers $123 billion per year – fail to show any positive impact on the populations they serve.
This is outrageous. That our elected officials participate in this sham and then claim they can’t afford to cut anything ought to disgust us all, especially when some are planning to spend even more. It demonstrates that a government program is proof of eternal life in Washington.
Whereas I hate excessive government spending just as much as the next guy, I actually feel that this article accomplishes none of the things that the author seems to aspire to accomplish. Obviously, Thomas doesn’t like government spending. He doesn’t like pork barrel spending. He most likely doesn’t like the spending of millions of dollars I political campaigns; money that could be used on more important things such as health care, or the protection of our borders. And he tries to combat all these things in one article. That’s his first mistake.
But he backed it all up with statistics and numbers. And still, somehow, it just feels like a rant. It feels like he goes out there and downplays both of America’s major political parties, and what we return to him is a form of nothing but frustration and the “whatever” response; much like one we would respond to a lecture with. But I guess that kind of proves his point. Americans are to the point where we don’t want to hear about our wrongdoings. When statistics accompany claims, we dismiss them as we would if the claim lacked them in the first place. As Americans, I think that we’re at the point where nothing but our own opinion matters. There is no room for change. As much as we believe that we want it, as was made apparent of the emergence of an iconic figure in Barack Obama, we’re just not ready for it at this point. Partisanship rules our disgust of those differently minded- politically speaking at least. Maybe something we should try to change. I just felt that he wasn’t persuasive enough in this article, and in my opinion, came off as the nagging mom type of figure.
So this budget thing seem to be a real big issue the American dollar has dropped drastically in the past four years because of George Bush. Why when the Democrats are having such an easy time with winning this next election wan to spend more money. We are already in debt 9 trillion dollars nationally. We need to spend less and start paying countries back. They brought up a good point in the article. Where is all the money going to come from? The people exactly. The people are not willing to give up their money for thing they don’t care about. If you’re going to take money from the people use it usefully. And when I say usefully I mean save it. And when I say save it I mean start paying back our national debt so countries think we’re reliable again. Also we’re having this big problem with social security. I’m not a genius, but I think people would be more happy to see it spent here than in the war.
I also have another thought. I know that Congress majority is Democrats and they tent to spend more money. But the article said that people who have been in congress longer are more willing to spend money. I know it partly because they have enough, but maybe there’s good reasoning behind it that only insiders see. They are politicians so who knows. Damn liberals. Derrick
Wow. The government spends a lot of money on useless things. That is pretty ridiculous. The thing that I found the most amusing was that about 22 percent of federal programs that cost taxpayers $123 billion per year show no positive impact of the people affected by them. Do they not realize these programs are useless and are just a waste of money, or do they still think they have a positive affect on people? It does seem that the government does do a lot of wasteful spending that could be conserved and maybe used to fix Social Security or some of the other things in need of funding so they don’t collapse here soon. Another way like the author said would be to reduce spending would be to reduce ear marks. Pork barrel spending, a complete waste of money. I think a good way to get rid of these would be to give the president the power to line-item-veto. Even though it is unconstitutional, if it was used to reduce needless spending it could have a really positive effect in helping with this. I wonder if there was a way to get something of this nature for the president to use, this would be a big start in fixing the problem of spending too much money?
The way our government spends money is absolutely outrageous! They act as if we don’t even have a budget to keep to! If the government expects Americans to pay up to an average of $3,100 more in federal taxes in the year 2009, they are greatly mistaken. There is no way that tax payers would go along with that – I don’t know who would! It is unbelievable the way the government ignores wasteful spending. A while back, I responded (quite harshly, I might add) to an article concerning pork barrel spending. My response can be tied in with this article as well. If the government didn’t waste so much money on ridiculous pork barrel projects, maybe we’d have more money lying around and wouldn’t have to get taxed so much! I know that it obviously must cost a fortune to run a country but still, if we want to regain the worth of the American dollar and finally start to pay back our national debt, the United States government needs to start spending OUR money more wisely.
My favorite little tidbit from the article was this fact: “Government auditors spent the last five years examining all federal programs and found that 22 percent of them – costing taxpayers $123 billion per year – fail to show any positive impact on the populations they serve.” That makes me want to scream, “You’ve got to be kidding me!” What exactly are these federal programs doing then?! And of course, the government is going to once again ignore this little fact and keep the programs running, wasting more of our money.
The government can’t really be compared to college students spending money crazily. Unlike people, the government doesn’t make payments. The government pays in full and doesn’t have the luxury of making payments. Payments are used to make things affordable. If a person can’t afford to buy their house for $400,000 now, they can pay for their house over a period of ten years or however many years. Typically the person will end up paying more for their house, but the payments over the ten years will make it easier to pay because the payment is not just one lump sum.
The Democratic budget analysis for 2009 isn’t too promising for the American people. What really needs to happen is for the government to get rid of wasteful programs and prevent more with a line-item veto. The line item veto is considered unconstitutional, but would allow the president to choose what programs they want to pass in a bill and which ones they want to be eliminated. No longer would presidents have to pass the bill with the “Bridge to Nowhere” included because they could just eliminate it from the bill. Also, the analysis shows that there is no room for entitlement programs. Entitlements are programs that are guaranteed to certain people from the government. Social Security and Medicare are examples of these. They cost the government so much and with the upcoming baby boom they will cost the government even more. When people reach 65 they are able to collect their social security and get health care provided by these entitlements.
All in all, the government needs to get their budget under control. Money needs to go into programs that need it and not into programs that will waste the taxpayer’s money.