Tag Archives: spending

Infrastructure Biden-Style

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That’s what his latest tax-and-spend multi-trillion dollar bill that he’s masquerading as an infrastructure bill is—a misleading mess of profligacy. Here’s some of what’s in it besides actual infrastructure monies.

  • $174 billion for electric vehicles
  • $400 billion on home-based care for the elderly and disabled
  • $25 billion on child care facilities
  • $50 billion on “research infrastructure” at the National Science Foundation
  • $213 billion for home sustainability and public housing
  • $35 billion+ for climate change R&D
  • $50 billion to create a new office at the Department of Commerce to “dedicated to monitoring domestic industrial capacity and funding investments to support production of critical goods”
  • $30 billion to prepare for future pandemics
  • $45 billion so the Feds can buy “clean energy goods”
  • $14 billion “to bring together industry, academia, and government to advance technologies and capabilities critical to future competitiveness”

That’s more than $1 trillion out of Biden’s $2 trillion demand for his bill. Many of these things might actually be worthy projects—depending on pesky details—but they have no place in a real, legitimate infrastructure program.

And there’s this non sequitur that has no immediate cost, but it will reduce take-home pay of non-union members to no useful purpose and greatly limit our economy and drive up prices through greatly increased union costs:

[T]he PRO Act, which would essentially override right-to-work laws in states across the country, allowing unions to extract dues from workers who do not want to be members.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY):

It’s like a Trojan horse. Its called infrastructure, but inside the Trojan horse it’s going to be more borrowed money, and massive tax increases on all the productive parts of our economy.

Indeed. Dollars—trillions of dollars—out of our economy immediately and trillions more for the foreseeable future.

Earmarks

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Progressive-Democrats in Congress are moving to bring these back. On this, I tend to agree.

Go ahead and do earmarks; they can be useful horse-trading tools. Just set aside 1% of the budget, the rough amount historically spent on them, as a separate line item.

Then require all earmarks in their aggregate to fit within that 1%, and require each earmark to be individually debated on the record and on the floor of the House and the Senate.

Let the public see, up front, what their tax dollars are paying for, and let the particular constituents see how effective their Congressman and Senator really are in representing them in each Congressional session.

Promises of Progressive-Democrats

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The Biden administration (or, as they like to style it, the Biden-Harris administration (can anyone remember the last administration that was referred to as the President-Vice President administration? The Kennedy-Johnson administration? The Carter-[mumble] administration?)) is making economic recovery promises. Here’s one from his brand-spanking new Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellon:

I’m anticipating, if all goes well, that our economy will be back to full employment—where we were before the pandemic—next year, and the Congressional Budget Office estimated that without this, it could probably take until 2024.

Yeah. Obama made similar promises regarding unemployment post his Panic of 2008 “stimulus.” The levels of unemployment embodied in those promises weren’t matched–his promises went unfulfilled–until some years after his promised date. Those failures were at least in part due to the explosion of regulations the Obama administration wrote.

Biden is making the same promise, through Yellen, engaging in the same regulatory explosion, and adding the fillip of overt attacks on our energy industry. And our economy will suffer the fate, exacerbated by that attack on our energy.

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.

Cent Wise and Euro Foolish

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Barron’s has an example, centered on Europe’s very own Wuhan Virus situation.

The EU economy shrank last year by 6.3%, according to the latest EU forecast, published on Thursday. That amounts to about €877 billion ($1.1 trillion) of lost gross domestic product last year. Or about €17 billion a week.
Compared with this, the total bill of vaccines procured until now by the EU—based on contracts signed, and vaccine prices confidential in principle but tweeted last December by the Belgian health minister—would amount to €20.5 billion.

The finally agreed vaccine bill amounts to a bare day-and-a-half over a week’s lost GDP—and how many lives.

While Barron’s writes its own price-is-no-object foolishness—When dealing with the pandemic, vaccines are quite literally priceless—the EU plainly wasted ‘way too much time, money, and lives, quibbling over relative pennies.

An outcome of the European Union’s foolishness:

20% of the UK population has already received at least a shot of one of the three [EU- and British-]approved inoculations—the Pfizer-BioNTech, AstraZeneca-Oxford, and Moderna vaccines. More than 13% of Americans are in a similar situation—but barely more than 4% of Europeans[.]