Since early 2004, I've often marveled at the fact that Howard Dean remains the head of the Democratic party in America. What, I wonder, must it be like for my Democratic friends to belong to a party whose spokesman is constantly garnering attention for saying the most amusingly asinine things?
Well, it turns out I just needed to wait a while. With people like Tom DeLay in the Republican Party, it was bound to happen sooner or later.
On Tuesday, DeLay, the House Majority Leader, declared that he had achieved an "ongoing victory" in cutting government spending. In DeLay Land, there is "no more fat to trim" from the government's interminable list of expenditures.
Now, I would love to live in a land where there truly are no more cuts possible in government spending. I would love to live in a land where the government runs things as efficiently and economically as possible.
This is not that land. Someone should tell Tom Delay.
If DeLay needs any evidence of the fallaciousness of his words, he should start by asking the citizens of Bozeman, Mont. In response to the bill that allocated more than $62 billion to the relief and rebuilding efforts after Hurricane Katrina, some citizens and leaders in the town suggested they give back $4 million that Congress had allocated to them to build a new parking garage. While $4 million is only a tiny fraction of the money going toward relief, imagine if every major city and town in America looked for pork-barrel projects like this that they could give up. The $62 billion would be covered quite handily, I imagine, and a sizeable dent might even be made in the governmental debt.
The Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation have both published extensive lists detailing ways the government wastes money and how spending could be cut back. Some examples include $20 billion in overpayments made by the federal government last year, more than $24 billion spent in 2003 that the federal government cannot account for - taxpayer dollars simply vanished into the cesspool of government accounting - and at least $2 billion paid to farmers for them not to farm their land. As for the latter, much of that land could be used to grow the crops to make ethanol, bringing the double boon of lower gas prices and less government waste.
While many of the Cato-suggested budget cuts require privatization of some things - Amtrak, ending airline subsidies, air traffic control - and that might be controversial, what shouldn't be controversial is cutting "pork" projects. Pork, to put it simply, is money sent by congressmen to their home districts - ostensibly for needed improvements, but in reality to buy votes. Local pork projects eat up unbelievable amounts of money, often with little or no purpose.
For instance, the government has spent more than $400 million on "bridges to nowhere" in Alaska. One such bridge is estimated to cost $1.5 billion over time to link Anchorage to a port that has exactly one tenant. This is just the most glaring example of what anyone with Google and ten minutes can see.
Certainly, no one is doubting that much government spending is necessary in the wake of Katrina. And certainly I don't doubt that it would be very possible to do what President Bush suggests - fully fund the relief bills without raising taxes.
What I do doubt is the likelihood of this happening until we all start acting more like people from Bozeman, Mont., and less like Tom DeLay.
Write to Tim at
redbaron.strikesagain@gmail.com
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