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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (25298)	1/20/2004 2:01:31 PM
From: gamesmistress	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 793718

This is what worries me about the Republicans: Drunken GOP Sailors Even Bill Clinton and a Democratic Congress didn't spend like this. Wall Street Journal Tuesday, January 20, 2004 12:01 a.m. In tonight's State of the Union address, President Bush can claim credit for a rebounding economy spurred by two rounds of tax cuts. He can take further credit for pushing those cuts despite opposition from the deficit hand-wringers--including, we now know, his first Treasury Secretary. But if the gap between revenues and outlays is of small concern in any single year--and especially during recession and war--it does not follow that there should be no worry over rapidly rising levels of federal spending. The much delayed omnibus appropriations bill for 2004, scheduled for a vote in the Senate this afternoon, looks set to cap the first term of the most profligate Administration since the 1960s. Steve Moore of the Club for Growth calls this bill a pork-laden monstrosity worse than any ever produced when Congress was controlled by "tax-and-spend" liberals. There's federal money for the Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, and one traffic light somewhere in upstate New York. There's $50 million for an indoor rain forest in Coralville, Iowa. (For that price we could send the whole town on a rain forest vacation.) There's $2 million for a golf awareness program in St. Augustine, Florida. The number of such earmarked federal expenditures has quintupled in the past five years to about 10,000, worth $23 billion, for 2004. What's more, Congress's drunken spending sailors consider all of this special interest money not a source of shame but of pride. "The subcommittees have tried to accommodate your priorities and concerns in this bill," reads a recent letter to colleagues from Senate Appropriations Chairman Ted Stevens of Alaska. "Attached you will find a list of projects that may be of particular interest to you ..." GOP leaders would have us believe this all adds up to one of the leanest spending plans in years--an increase in federal discretionary spending of only 3%, compared with 13% and 12% in each of the previous two years. But Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation points out that it's really more like a 9% increase, and that's assuming there will be no supplemental appropriations as in previous years. The 3% vs. 9% discrepancy results from the difference between budget authority and actual outlays. The increase in budget authority looks smaller only because a lot of money that will actually be spent in 2004 was assigned to 2003. That's true most importantly of the Iraq war supplemental. But the drive for the appearance of fiscal sanity has also reduced our representatives to gimmicks such as moving the authority for $2.2 billion in education spending back into 2003, after previously voting to push it forward to 2004. When corporations tried accounting like this, Congress gave us Sarbanes-Oxley. The bottom line is truly shocking. Passage of the omnibus bill would raise total discretionary spending to more than $900 billion in 2004. By contrast, the eight Clinton-era budgets produced discretionary spending growth from $541 billion 1994 to $649 billion in 2001. Nor can recent increases be blamed on the war. At 18.6%, the increase in non-defense discretionary spending under the 107th Congress (2002-2003) is far and away the biggest in decades. In 2003, total federal spending topped an inflation-adjusted $20,000 per household for the first time since World War II. Amazing as it may sound, the ostensibly small-government GOP seems totally oblivious to the fact that all this spending puts its future economic agenda in jeopardy. Appropriations do mean taxes after all, even if they're deferred taxes. There's also a moral dimension here. Can anybody honestly maintain that working Americans should be coerced to ante up for golf awareness? As we went to press yesterday, GOP leaders still didn't have the votes to pass the bill. There were rumors of a possible deal with Western Senators including Tom Daschle to speed up country-of-origin labeling requirements for food (currently delayed by this bill). Here's hoping, for once, that Senator Daschle holds his ground and embarrasses the GOP. The truth is that this spending bill is hardly necessary. The government has been running just fine at 2003 spending levels since September (have you noticed?), and can easily continue to do so for the rest of the fiscal year. We realize Mr. Bush is eager for passage of certain line items, such as his program to combat AIDS in Africa, but this bill is literally too high a price to pay, especially in terms of his own credibility. We're not holding our breath for a change of heart, but President Bush can help shore up his conservative base and appeal to many moderate voters by exercising his very first veto here. Profligate President Average annual real increases in domestic discretionary spending Fiscal years / Increase Lyndon Johnson / 1965-69 / 4.3% Richard Nixon / 1970-75 / 6.8% Gerald Ford / 1976-77 / 8.0% Jimmy Carter / 1978-81 / 2.0% Ronald Reagan / 1982-89 / -1.3% George H.W. Bush / 1990-93 / 4.0% Bill Clinton / 1994-2001 / 2.5% George W. Bush / 2002-04 / 8.2% Source: Club for Growth, based on U.S. Budget, Historical Tables, 2004

To: LindyBill who wrote (25298)	1/20/2004 2:21:49 PM
From: michael97123	Respond to of 793718

Actually the mccarthyites were far more idealistic than we rfk folks. We knew that rfk had support among blue collar dems who were essential if the anti war folks were to have a chance. McCarthy was too ivory towerish for the blue collar dems. As for rfks anti communism, wiretaps, etc. he makes ashcroft look like Ramsey Clark. If you determine a threat to be real, you preempt. Most dems knew that back then. The king thing was over the top however as was the disrespect of women but those were different times. Mike