Daily Archives: 24 February 2021

GIGO

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The Garbage Out is easily summarized: the Progressive-Democrats’ $1.9 trillion Wuhan Virus “relief” bill that the House is putting its finishing touch on and then will send to the Senate.

The garbage going in:

  • $350 billion for state and local governments, cities, and counties. Progressive-Democrats also changed the funding formula to ensure most of the dollars go to blue states that shutdown their State economies—to the detriment of neighboring States as well as to their own
  • $86 billion to bail out 185 or so multiemployer pension plans insured by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. Never mind that these so-called plans have been badly underfunded since their inception by both the employers and the unions that created them
  • $129 billion for elementary and secondary schools, whether they reopen for classroom learning or not. Never mind, either, that most of the funds allocated by CARES remains unspent—or that of these new $129 billion isn’t scheduled to be spent until years later

And this garbage:

  • $50 billion for the Federal Emergency Management Agency
  • $39 billion for child care
  • $30 billion for public transit agencies
  • $19 billion in rental assistance
  • $10 billion in mortgage help
  • $4.5 billion for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance program
  • $3.5 billion for the program formerly known as food stamps
  • $1 billion for Head Start
  • $1.5 billion for Amtrak
  • $4 billion to pay off loans of “socially disadvantaged” farmers and ranchers
  • nearly $1 billion in world food assistance.

Never mind that of these $162.5 billoin, only the FEMA money might have utility. The rest of it is utterly unnecessary for anything other than vote-buying. The “needs” implied here would disappear were the States to reopen their economies and the Federal government to get out of the way so businesses could operate and Americans go back to work.

And this raw sewage:

  • $15 an hour minimum wage

Never mind the business- and job-destroying (to the tune of 1.4 million jobs) nature of such a mandate.

  • an increase to the child tax credit to $3,000 from $2,000 ($99 billion)
  • expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit to certain additional childless adults ($25 billion)

Which wouldn’t be necessary were Government out of the way and our State and national economy reopened.

Even earmarks:

  • $1.5 million for the Seaway International Bridge connecting New York to Canada
  • nearly $500 million for, as the CBO puts it, “grants to fund activities related to the arts, humanities, libraries and museums, and Native American language preservation.”

But this is what the Progressive-Democrats are demanding. Watch Senators Joe Manchin (D, WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D, AZ) vote these up because they’ll vote up the overall $1.9 trillion bill, along nakedly partisan reconciliation, for all their pious sermons about requiring bipartisanship on all bills.

Earmarks

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Leave it to Progressive-Democrats to want to bring this exemplar of spendthrift back. You know what earmarks are:

“member-directed spending,” [that] are provisions discreetly tucked away in large spending vehicles that directly fund a pet project championed by a specific member of Congress for the member’s own constituents.

Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D, CT) and Senator Pat Leahy (D, VT)—the respective chairs of the House and Senate Appropriations committees are about to introduce legislation that would restore the business.

In contrast, Senator Ted Cruz (R, TX) and Congressman Ted Budd (R, NC) are pushing the Earmark Elimination Act, which would ban earmarks permanently. Citizens Against Government Waste President Tom Schatz told Just the News that

Earmarks are the most corrupt, costly, and inequitable practice in the history of Congress. They led to members, staff, and lobbyists being incarcerated. In a form of legalized bribery, members of Congress vote for tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in appropriations bills in return for a few million dollars in earmarks. Earmarks go to those in power, as shown during the 111th Congress, when the 81 members of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, who constituted 15% of Congress, got 51% of the earmarks and 61% of the money. Restoring earmarks will lead to the same results.

I’m not as adamantly opposed to earmarks as some: they can be useful horsetrading tools, usable to facilitate political tradeoffs to get important legislation passed—or other useless legislation blocked.

The major problem, it seems to me, has been the secretive nature of earmarks. They tended to be negotiated behind closed doors, out of the public’s view, and then buried in one or another appropriations bill. The process needs to be better structured.

In that 111th Congress, the total amount that wound up being spent on earmarks amounted to some 3% of that session’s first year budget. Accordingly, break out those 3% into a separate appropriations bill as a sort of earmark slush fund. Then have every earmark proposal individually debated on the House and Senate floors until the 3% is committed, and where differences occur between the final House and Senate slush fund appropriations bills, let the bills be reconciled via House-Senate joint committees, just as every other bit of legislation is.

Let the horsetrading occur in plain sight of the House and Senate member constituencies. Ordinary Americans can handle the sight of sausage making. Honest.

And they’ll take appropriate action at the next election. ‘Course, that’s what the politicians are afraid of.