Federal Spending
Reason #27: Private Servants
“… public service is leading to private riches.”- Public Citizen
Too many of our leaders act like they’re on the corporate payroll. Take former Republican congressman Billy Tauzin. The pharmaceutical industry gave him almost $100,000 for his reelection campaign in 2002. Tauzin earned that money back for them and a lot more during his next term when he worked tirelessly to pass the bloated Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America organization was so pleased with his efforts, it offered him a $2 million a year job. He could barely wait until his term was up to accept.
Public Citizen…
August 26, 2008 | Read More
Pay as you Go, People!
What a radical concept: We shouldn’t spend money we don’t have.
From 1990 to 2002, Congress lived under so called PAYGO rules, as in “pay as you go.” The rules demanded that any new federal spending could not be approved without securing new revenues to pay for it. In other words, for a short time, our government actually tried to live within its means. What a concept!
But George W. Bush’s tax cuts and, later, his budget-busting Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit broke the back of PAYGO and the Republican-controlled Congress abandoned their fiscal discipline. In 2007, the new Democratic congress resurrected PAYGO, but…
August 25, 2008 | Read More
Stick a Pin in Voodoo Economics
Supply-side economics has had its time. One silver lining of the current economic crisis is that it will, hopefully, spell the end of this misguided philosophy. Endless growth is a myth and you can’t build a sustainable society by giving the prosperous more benefits than the least fortunate. It just doesn’t work. Ronald Reagan tried it, George Bush Sr. tried it, as did his son. All three sank our country into massive red ink.
First things first, we need to reverse George W. Bush’s tax cuts. It was outrageous to cut taxes during a war, but even if our army wasn’t…
August 25, 2008 | Read More
Reason #20: Governomics - Spending Like There’s No Tomorrow
Instead of cutting spending as promised, the Bush Administration greatly expanded the federal bureaucracy. Nearly every category of government spending grew like a weed on his watch. And the war in Iraq, which was supposed to cost a pittance (and be offset by Iraq’s oil revenues), will cost U.S. taxpayers $3 trillion by the time it ends. That is, if it ever ends. Unfortunately, George W.’s free spending is not an aberration. Spending has gone up under all our recent presidents, even after adjusting for inflation. Since the 1960’s and Lyndon Johnson’s “Guns and Butter” spending on Vietnam and his Great Society…
August 25, 2008 | Read More
Reason #19: Voodoo Economics Reborn
From 2001 to 2003, George W. Bush pushed through some of the biggest tax cuts in our nation’s history. His own treasury secretary at the time, Paul O’Neill, tried to convince him the cuts were shortsighted. O’Neill rightly predicted they would kill revenues and send the government deeper into the red over the long term. Bush not only failed to listen to him, he forced him to resign.
The President pledged that the tax cuts would actually lower the national debt by spurring the economy. He promised 800,000 new jobs would be created because of them. Instead, the country lost 2.7 million…
August 25, 2008 | Read More
Reason #18: Bush’s Debt Bomb
“A billion here and a billion there, pretty soon you are talking about real money.” -Everett Dirksen, former U.S. Senator
When Bush ran for the presidency in 2000, one of the ways he tried to enhance his “outsider” status was by talking a big game about how he was going to get federal spending under control. What a crock that turned out to be. His pledge of fiscal discipline would be laughable if his recklessness weren’t jeopardizing our children’s future.
In 2000, our country’s national debt was around five and a half trillion dollars. Not exactly a small sum, by any means.…
August 25, 2008 | Read More
Reason #7: The Social Security Ponzi Scheme
Our politicians have treated Social Security like Ponzi’s infamous scheme.
One of the ways career politicians keep feeding the ever growing government beast is by cooking the books and robbing surpluses in one program to pay for deficits elsewhere. And no government program’s accounts have been fudged and fiddled with more than Social Security.
In 1920, an Italian immigrant named Charles Ponzi set up an investment scheme in which he promised people 50 percent returns on their investments after only forty-five days. It was a simple scam: he just used the proceeds from new investors to cover the payouts coming due. As…
August 25, 2008 | Read More
Reason #5: D.C.’s Alphabet Soup
“A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.” - Barry Goldwater
In the late 1700’s, the federal government had a total of four departments: State, Treasury, Justice, and War (Defense). Over the next 160+ years, it added another four. But in the last 55 years alone, eight new giant departments came into being, including HHS, HUD, the VA, and the EPA.
This alphabet soup of new bureaucracies has caused federal spending to boil over. According to a paper written for the Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis, our government spent…
August 25, 2008 | Read More
