The Malady Of Rampant Federal Spending
By Charles Cole (02/08/05)
Having passed through the “silly season”, aka the election, we next come to the “whacky season”, better known as the formulation of the federal budget. I came across a very interesting article on the Heritage Foundation’s website written by a member of their staff who specializes in the federal budget process. The article was a very well written, comprehensive analysis of much of what is wrong with the process by which Congress makes the legislative sausage known as the federal budget.
The writer identified just about every technical problem imaginable concerning the out-of- control process which produces such grotesque spending documents as the current federal budget. Interesting reading. However, as a retired federal government manager and long-time observer of the political process in this country, I fear that the solutions to the problem of rampant federal spending advocated by the writer will come to naught, thanks to the sheer weight of inertia of the current system, not to mention the cumulative skills in budgetary wizardry developed by our Congressional leaders in Washington.
Congress has demonstrated an uncanny ability to skirt virtually any statutory reform scheme, as evidenced by how deftly they created the now-infamous 537 loophole to the Campaign Finance Law (the latest in a series of reform efforts aimed at "taking the money out of politics"). I fear that the problem really isn't in the mechanics of the current budgetary process so much as it lies in every incumbent politician’s total inability to abstain from sending pork back home, ensuring a long tenure in office.
I believe it might have been Cato who noted that one must never be given the authority to tax and a concomitant right to spend revenues thus confiscated from the people. The temptations involved invariably prove too strong for even the most well-intentioned politician to forever resist. The use of the tax and spend machine by the Democrat Party has been well documented since the days of Harry Hopkins – FDR’s advisor who coined the mantra for obtaining and retaining power in American politics ("tax, tax, tax, spend, spend, spend, elect, elect, elect"). It has worked for those folks for over 70 years now.
Oh, the poor, woeful conservative Republicans in Congress! Theirs is truly an unenviable lot in life. They spent decades trying to stand up for things such as fiscal responsibility, personal accountability and restraint in government spending. Their attempts at reining in the feral federal hog proved too high a mountain to climb, and they were reduced to miniscule minorities in the Congress for over 40 years as the Democrat spending juggernaut rolled over them time and time again.
This is not so difficult to understand. As a friend of mine used to put it, imagine you're running for Congress, arguing staunchly for restraint in federal spending to avoid mortgaging our children's future to federal debt while your (usually incumbent) opponent is promising every constituent in the district that the good times will never end and that he will continue bringing back large slabs of federal pork to the local area – everything from federal construction projects, to water projects, to dams and roads and housing projects – the list was endless. Goodtime Charlie Democrat Incumbent always prevailed and Honest Abe Republican Challenger consistently gleaned but a mere 35 - 40 percent of the vote in election cycle after election cycle.
Finally, Mr. I-Gave-It-My-Best-Shot Republican figured out that the game was rigged and bought into the process. Ever since then the deficits have skyrocketed, featuring uncontrolled spending on everything from Lawrence Welk museums to federal grants to study the effects of cow flatulence on the ozone layer. Among these schemes, perhaps the most outrageous was foisted on the taxpayer by erstwhile Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee Jimmy Whitten who spent over 52 years in the House. He managed to finagle a "federal project", replete with which lavish funding, designed to divert the flow of the Mississippi River so that it would pass through his local area.
If our democratic republic is to survive intact, the citizenry must develop a sense of civic responsibility and put the common good above local interests. Barring this, the federal hog-a-thon will continue to gain speed every year as this mighty freight train hurdles on toward its own ultimate demise in a sea of red ink, debt and the eventual bankruptcy of the federal treasury. Sadly, with the notable exceptions of WWII and our young soldiers serving in Iraq, the recent historical record isn’t promising as to our people’s willingness to sacrifice for the common good of society.
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