By Ryan Young on 2.16.06 @ 12:06AM
Or how I learned to stop worrying and love Ted Stevens.
The president's new budget calls for $2.77 trillion to be spent.
That's 45 percent more than President Clinton's most bloated
budget. Clearly the executive branch cannot be counted on to be
fiscally sound. That leaves Congress.
I know: Cue rim shot.
But there are reasons for limited-government types to be
guardedly optimistic. One of these reasons, oddly enough, is
Senator Ted Stevens. While he won his battle in getting us to pay
more than $400 million to build two bridges in remote parts of
Alaska, the outrage he inspired could usher in real change.
The bridges are the chief inspiration behind the earmark reforms
now being proposed. These concrete monuments to congressional
tenure virtually guarantee that the $22 billion to be spent on
earmarks this year will not be surpassed for some time, and may be
substantially scaled back.
Senators Coburn and McCain have pledged to offer amendments to
individually eliminate every earmark they find. With 13,999
earmarks passed last year, the Senators were right to call their
threat potentially "time-consuming."
A reasonable guess is that (a) some compromise will be reached
and (b) earmarks will be cut in half --- at least -- for fiscal
year 2007.
That's good news, but earmarks account for less than 1 percent
of total government spending. Even if they were to disappear
completely, government would still continue to grow three times
faster than it did under Bill Clinton, and more than twice as fast
as under the first President Bush.
The cause of the Republican spending explosion has been the
weed-like growth in entitlement spending. But even here we have
some glittering good news. Due to the hue and cry about out of
control spending, Senate Republicans have been shamed into reducing
entitlement bloat from 6.4 percent to 6.3 percent over the next
five years.
Of course, critics have claimed that this rounding error sized
reduction is a "cut." It's one of those wearying fallacies that
just doesn't seem to go away. More money will be spent on
entitlements this year than last year, and the increases will
continue as far as the eye can see. It's depressing to open the
paper and see headlines like "Entitlements Cut: Set to Grow
6.3%."
Despite the fierce resistance to such puny measures, there is
reason for hope. For the first time in recent memory, many
Republicans actually held their ground in passing the entitlement
growth reduction, thanks to the outrageous Senator Stevens.
Now even President Bush, a bigger spender than Lyndon Johnson,
wants to eliminate 91 federal programs. According to bean counters
in the House Republican Study Committee, this would save taxpayers
$7.3 billion. By my calculations this would save nearly one third
of one percent of total federal spending.
It's a start.
topics:
Bill Clinton, Entitlements, Earmarks, NATO, Alaska
