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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rascal who wrote (131365)	5/4/2004 11:20:07 AM
From: jttmab	Respond to of 281500

the line item veto was used as an excuse by congress to fix budget excesses. I believe that you are correct on the point, but it was, IMO, more rhetoric than reality. I was rather surprised that there were 82 line item vetoes by Clinton. I think that the sheer number and the little coverage indicates that there were not any large programs involved. Had Bush been President the items vetoed may have been different, but the end result would have been the same. By and large Congress has little impact on the overall budget. Items that Congress does have direct control over are pork, which no White House ever pays much attention to. But that's a very small portion of the budget. Mandatory spending, no one has any control over, it's mandatory. Discretionary spending. Congress tweaks what the Presidents submits as a proposal. If the President submits a $2T budget, how much does Congress "tweak" before it's significant? 5%, 10%? 10% of $2T is $200B; Congress never gets even close to 10%. I think in the FY2004 budget, pork accounted for $4B, which the Congress adjusted for by slashing the Presidents submission by a small % across the board. ... each program was "slashed" by ~0.2%. The margin of error in budget estimates is larger than 0.2%. On the revenue side in the Washington Post today, the government now estimates that they may have been off by as much as $100B just in this years recent tax collection. As Barry Goldwater said...A billion year, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money. That's so dated, it needs to be adjusted of inflation. $10B here, $10B there.... Maybe, if there is a change in management in DC this fall we can quietly back away from the Medicare Bill and those 2 "Alien" Projects (Mars and Mexico). Both alien projects are pretty much non-starters. Congress has no interest in supporting either one of them without any strong interest on the part of the Administration and neither was/is popular in the electorate. The Mars project has so little support by the President it didn't even receive a mention in the SOTU. jttmab