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A return to priorities

November 14, 2005 | By The Heritage Foundation

 

Imagine that your basement floods a month before you are scheduled to take a vacation. Your furnace is ruined under eight inches of water, and your washer and drier can't be salvaged. What do you do? You'll probably cancel or at least postpone your vacation—you would decide that spending money on the vacation would be a bit wasteful when you have really important things to spend money on. Sure, you'd like to treat yourself, but you earn only so much money and it can go only so far.

Wouldn't it be nice if Congress thought the same way?

In times of crisis, we must make hard decisions about our priorities. Until recently, Congress would routinely make decisions between what's really important and what'd be nice to do but not essential. But today, Congress wants to re-do the basement and take a vacation—it wants to throw money at hurricane relief and pay through the nose on Medicare and thousands of pet projects that Congress has no business funding.

Ideally, Congress would hold off on the new Medicare bill and control the other spending until they can be afforded. But Congress also has an option you and I lack: it can increase it's income. That is, it can raise taxes, and that does nobody any good—except Congress.

A setback on spending...

Last Thursday, Heritage Foundation President Ed Feulner spoke on national television about the need for Congress to act now on spending reform. He relayed two of The Heritage Foundation’s common-sense proposals that would return a modicum of restraint to government and allow Congress to pay for hurricane relief without adding to the soaring deficits:

  • End pork barrel spending
  • Postpone the new Medicare drug entitlement for at least one year

These two measures will save taxpayers $66 billion in the first year alone. And with the bill from Hurricane Katrina expected to top $150 billion, these reforms are sorely needed.

But Congress has seemed unprepared to listen to our calls for fiscal sanity; our leaders are behaving as if money actually does grow on trees. In the Senate, a few forward-thinking lawmakers proposed rebuilding a Louisiana highway using money from the $200 million “bridge to nowhere” in Alaska. Advocates of wasteful spending, though, defeated the measure with appeals to raw emotion.

...but a new cause for optimism

But while this was a setback, there is yet reason to hope.

The shameful performance by pork-barrel spending advocates showed the American people how untenable their position really is. Americans are coming to recognize the “bridge to nowhere” and the wasteful spending it symbolizes for what it is: a national embarrassment. Critics of spending like Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) are fast becoming media darlings as they fight the establishment.

Our legislators have an excellent opportunity to improve our nation’s financial health in the coming weeks and months:

  • The House of Representatives has the power to make dramatic cuts to wasteful federal spending in the forthcoming budget reconciliation bill
  • The bipartisan proposals to cut spending in the face of disaster is a return to the sound fiscal policies of just a few years ago

Major media take up the call for spending reform

As one political journalist recently explained, politicians who favor spending restraint may have finally broken through the media fog on the issue. In recent weeks, several major newspapers have railed against the profligate spending on Capitol Hill.

Here's a sampling of opinion from around the country:

  • The Baltimore Sun (10/24) wonders if Congress has abandoned common sense on spending issues
  • USA Today (10/24) writes that Congress’s attitude toward spending leaves “the republic itself…in jeopardy"
  • The Washington Post (10/23) has harsh words for Sen. Ted Stevens’ spirited defense of his state’s highway bill earmarks
  • The Chicago Tribune (10/23) wonders whether the odds are better playing the lottery than waiting for Republicans in Congress to get serious about spending
  • The Juneau Empire (10/23) notes that the Ketchikan bridge, along with similar pork-barrel earmarks, endangers the state’s and the country’s higher priority projects
  • The Austin (Texas) American-Statesman (10/22) thinks so little of Congress that it describes Sen. Tom Coburn’s winning 13 votes to kill a notorious pork project as a “miracle”
  • The Ventura County (California) Star (10/22) berates the Senate for pursuing gimmicks while neglecting real cuts
  • Investor’s Business Daily (10/21) finds an appalling lack of fiscal discipline in recent votes
  • The Las Vegas Review-Journal (10/21) wonders why no members of the Nevada delegation have signed onto the Katrina no-pork pledge
  • The La Crosse (Wisconsin) Tribune (10/21) pines for a “Ross Perot figure” to bring some fiscal sanity to Washington
  • The Sarasota Florida Herald-Tribune (10/24) argues that Congress needs to do much more than put off a pay raise
  • The Charleston (South Carolina) Post & Courier (10/23) praises Coburn’s efforts and calls highway bill pork “indefensible”
  • Even the New York Times (10/13) argues that there’s plenty of wasteful spending that Congress should cut
  • The (Riverside, CA) Press Enterprise (10/12) celebrates Rep. Tom DeLay’s ouster from GOP leadership in the hope that it may return Republicans to fiscal sanity
  • The Mankato (Minnesota) Free Press (10/9) argues that fiscal pain is coming and Congress must start prioritizing and cutting now
  • The (Westchester County, New York) Journal News (10/7) faults the President and Congress for the recent explosion in federal spending
  • The Watertown (NY) Daily Times (10/5) praises communities’ efforts to give back their highway bill pork and direct the savings to hurricane relief
  • The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch (10/4) praises Alaskans who are willing to give up the state’s “Bridge to Nowhere” highway bill boondoggle
  • The Ventura County (California) Star (10/3) accuses Republicans of losing their way on spending
  • The Washington Post (10/2) blames record pork-barrel spending on Congress and the President
  • The San Antonio Express News (10/2) wonders why local pork projects cannot be sacrificed for the greater good
  • The Richmond (Indiana) Palladium-Item (9/27) praises Rep. Pence for standing up and proposing offsets to hurricane-related spending
  • The Daily Oklahoman (9/27) praises Sen. Tom Coburn for seeking offsets

Even staunchly left-leaning media are jumping on the anti-waste bandwagon. For example, The Daily Show, a television program popular among young people, is set to parody Congress’ big-spending ways.

And these papers are all running letters to the editor critiquing government pork—and people are taking note. This goes to show that writing a letter to the editor can make a difference.

Could a new Fed chairman help?

President Bush nominated Ben Bernanke to serve as the next chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Perhaps he will be able to convince Congress of the importance of spending control where outgoing chairman Alan Greenspan could not.

A Wilma warning

Liberals are sure to say Congress should shell out even more money to help pay for the reconstruction from Hurricane Wilma, which smashed its way across Florida yesterday. Early news reports say the disaster cost over a dozen lives and destroyed several billion dollars worth of property—potentially tacking another few billion dollars onto the federal deficit.

But I remain optimistic that Congress has learned its lesson from Hurricane Katrina: the job of government in these situations is to get out of the way and, when it is involved, to keep spending under control.

Treating the disease

Our goal in the spending fight is not simply to pay for hurricane relief—for that only treats the symptoms, not the disease. We have to restore this fiscal discipline to its proper place so that all decisions are made in a responsible manner.

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