My final (I think) post on the Rove speech at AEI today, which
FOLLOWS this one, will highlight the parts of Rove’s substance that
were right on target and that he explained well. Here, though, a
very important criticism: On the issue of spending, the man is full
of Bullfeathers.
Rove continues to try to push the tired old White House line
that it has done a good job keeping a lid on excess spending. The
line is sheer bunk. He said the federal government under Bush’s
leadership has “reduced the growth of non-security discretionary
spending every year in office.” The way he is using this, it is a
meaningless statistic. What really has happened is that Congress
and the White House keep redefining what counts as
domestic discretionary spending so that they look more fiscally
responsible (by far) than they actually have been. More and more
and more often, spending items that would be included in ordinary
domestic Appropriations bill are instead hidden in numerous other
ways. Let me highlight some of the ways:
1) They might be included in a regular defense spending bill.
Presto — suddenly some goofy museum or other counts not as
domestic discretionary spending, but as military spending instead,
even though it does absolutely nothing to improve the defense
of our country.
2) They might be included in an “emergency” supplemental
appropriation. In fact, the use of this trick has reached epidemic
proportions. Hence the Senate can lard up a bill for Iraq war costs
and Katrina relief with about $14 billion in purely local — non
war-related, non-hurricane related — pork, yet can avoid
officially “counting” it as domestic discretionary spending.
3) As in example one, purely local pork and all sorts of other
social spending has been snuck into the appropriations bill for
Homeland Security — a new category, obviously, in the past five
years, yet one which Rove and Co. do not count as “non-security
domestic spending.” It’s for homeland security, see, so it’s for
security — even if it (in the case of “first responder” grants)
pays for cars primarily used to take the local prom court to the
homecoming game, or defibrillators in some podunk town that the
local high school keeps handy in case some parent gets overexcited
at the local hoops match. (Those examples are from memory; I’m
checking them for accuracy now, but for these purposes they can be
used as illustrative examples of the KIND of waste and mis-labeling
of pork that occurs during the process.)
4) Finally, Congress can find other ways to push spending “off
budget,” meaning it doesn’t get counted in the normal “domestic
discretionary” accounting for a particular fiscal year. But it
still gets spent. It just gets pushed into the next year, or
pushed into some other category, or…whatever. Just a couple of
months ago, Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter was openly calling these
shell games “gimmicks,” and bragging that Congress’
ever-more-successful attempts to use (and abuse) such gimmicks
proves that Congress has finally become “liberal” — which, again,
Specter clearly thought was a good thing, worth not complaining
about but rejoicing in.
But, as I say, it still gets spent. So when the final
budget deficit figure for each year is calculated, it is
astronomical, at the very same time that Rove and company try to
claim with a straight face that they are being so fiscally
disciplined.
As a matter of fact, in responding to a good question at AEI
(from Jeanne Cummings of the Wall Street Journal) about the
budget-busting transportation bill, Rove sort of unintentionally
acknowledged this game playing by, after first claiming that the
Transpo bill was the ONLY time, from among Bush’s 39 veto threats,
that Congress “breached his target,” then turning around and trying
to say that the target wasn’t really breached because Congress had
found a “face-saving ability” to go beyond the target while using
budget legerdemain to hide the true amount of the spending in the
official budget “scoring” of it. In other words, he admitted that
Bush allowed them to cheat.
And, for that matter, he didn’t mention the important note that
Bush kept moving the goal posts as to what actual dollar figure (it
kept getting higher over the course of two years) would trigger a
veto in the first place, games or no games.
Okay, this blog post has gone on too long, so my next one will
continue this subject with some advice re the spending mess, before
I do what eventually will be a fourth blog post re Rove that
returns to praising him.
