Daily Archives: 2 January 2012

Federal Spending: Why Is It Still Rising?

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As The Wall Street Journal reports, total Federal spending will run to $3.65 trillion in 2012, up from $3.6 trillion for the just concluded 2011.  So, what happened to the spending cuts the Republicans promised in the run up to the 2010 elections?  A funny thing happened on the way to the Washington pig trough.

The Democrats, in the summer debt ceiling “negotiations,” blocked any savings more extensive than $7 billion before they would allow any sort of deal on the debt ceiling to be concluded.  Only 28 programs, out of the thousands Washington uses for vote buying, got cut—and these involved nothing but walking around money: a $1.2 million program for “civic education” was eliminated, for instance.  With the Solyndra scandal pushing hard, DoE’s loan guarantee program for “green” startups got axed, though.

What else?  Amtrak, the Legal Services Corporation, National Public Radio, the United Nations population program, mass transit grants, funding for the UN’s Climate Panel all were retained. Spending actually went up for other programs: the National Institutes of Health, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Indian Health Service, Bureau of Land Management, for instance.

Again, I ask: what happened?  The House did, after all, pass a serious budget with real cuts in it and a plan for entitlement reform.  But Obama and the Democratic Party-controlled Senate simply blocked everything else.  In the Senate, the Democrats simply refused to propose a budget of their own so those negotiations could be carried out—no discussion at all occurred.  The Democrats scored Congressman Paul Ryan (R, WI) for being so rude as to propose changing entitlements, instead of debating the matter, or offering their own ideas.

And the Republican leadership acted like a bunch of neophytes and idiots. The Republicans failed to respond to the attacks on Ryan for his proposals.  They got conned by a boxer from Nevada and a small-time neighborhood organizer from Chicago.  Republicans were suckered into secret meetings with Obama, who publically assured all who would listen that he really wanted fiscal discipline, and then in those secret meetings, he demanded $1 trillion in tax hikes.  When the Republicans could not accept that increase, Obama attacked them publically for blowing up the negotiations.  Then they let the Democrats beat them up over payroll tax cuts instead of calling the Democrats out for defunding Social Security and pushing instead for income tax cuts—of the permanent kind—of the same per centage reductions as the Dems’ payroll cuts.

It went like that all year.  Republican naïve (naïve! after all their years in Washington) leadership being played like a cheap fiddle, and they were unable to respond.  Maybe this crop of Republican leaders are too used to being in the minority, too used to losing: they no longer know how to win.  Worse, they no longer have actual conservative principles to defend and to push for.

The WSJ suggests this for the Republicans:

They need to draw contrasts with Democrats on taxes, spending, regulation and reform that at least educate the public about what’s at stake.  Pick some programs and make them budget-cutting showcases.  Use the savings to finance tax cuts that promote growth.  Or simply vote for tax reform whether or not it is “revenue neutral” under Congress’s silly budget rules.  Follow votes in the House by bringing pro-growth bills to the Senate and forcing Democrats to vote up or down, as they did with the Keystone XL pipeline.

Maybe the Republicans need new leadership—in both chambers—before they’ll be able to do this.  The current crop of leaders started strong—and then let the community organizer lead them around like a trained pony.

Regulations of our Government

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Kevin O’Brien of The Plain Dealer has already addressed this particular aspect of an over-regulatory government, so I’ll just quote heavily from his editorial.  It seems our illustrious Labor Secretary, Hilda Solis, is the one who’s at it for our government, this time.  Per Solis, kids aren’t to be allowed to work on the family farm, anymore.  They might catch a blister, poor dears.

It seems Solis’ answer to this problem is to

…prohibit hired workers under 16 from operating almost all power-driven equipment unless they have been “enrolled in a vocational education program in agriculture under a recognized state or local educational authority or in a substantially similar program conducted by a private school.”

So, let’s see: a VoTech program is better equipped to train a minor in operating farm equipment than is the farmer who owns and operates that equipment.  Last I looked, VoTech programs don’t have many tractors, or balers, or plows, or harrows, or….  Those are mostly down on the farm.  On what basis would we expect a school to train the use of farm equipment or tools when they don’t have any?  There’s that Federal government logical thinking.

Solis insists that kids working on the farm have a higher fatality rate than kids working elsewhere (wait—there are kids working?  Where are Solis’ child labor laws?  Certainly, they’re not working in their schools as part-time janitors…).

But as O’Brien points out,

[The kids are] a lot less vulnerable than children who have to walk through a bad neighborhood after their shift at McDonald’s….

Solis goes even further:

…prohibit young people from doing any work that would take them more than six feet above ground level or engaging in any activity that would expose them to “unpredictable animal behavior.”

But tree climbing for recreation is OK—or is government going to intrude into my backyard and ban that, too?  The neighbor’s dog doesn’t like me, either—but he’s pretty predictable.  Never mind that; as O’Brien points out, sometimes you have to work more than six feet off the ground.  Ha lofts in barns, for instance.

As Senator Ben Nelson (D, NE) points out, though, this sort of rule is inimical to the welfare of farming and of rural economies.  Solis’ rule could

…change the structure of family farms and have a negative impact on the education of the next generation of farmers.

This proposed rule is another example of Washington being out of touch with Nebraskans’ values.  The Department of Labor should kill this rule before it destroys important traditions in rural America and hurts the farm economy.

One out of every three jobs in Nebraska is tied to agriculture.  We need to increase opportunities for our family farmers and ranchers to strengthen our rural economies, not threaten them with new, unneeded regulations from Washington.

Of course, Solis could have another class of laborer in mind for these jobs.

As O’Brien describes this from his own childhood, actual learning by the young worker would be lost to such rules:

I learned a tremendous amount about animals in those years, and a fair amount about people. I chased things. I got chased by things. I learned that work — even sweaty, smelly, dusty, tiring work — could be fun.

and

Along the way, I learned to differentiate among things and activities that deserved respect, things and activities that were actually worth fearing and things and activities that were no big deal if you handled them properly.

These are lessons that aren’t available in any school or VoTech program.  These are lessons that only can be learned through doing.

As O’Brien points out, though,

…a little time on the farm would have done Hilda Solis some good. She spooks too easily….