Nothing but Reruns

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) continues to waste time filing pointless bills in Congress.

H.R. 378 demands a 1% across-the-board spending cut on everything but defense and homeland security. H.R. 377 makes it 2%. H.R. 381 makes it 5%.

Congressman Blackburn has introduced these bills during each of her three previous terms, she brags in a recent press release.

Well, thanks for nothing, Congressman! You’ve failed all three times on all three bills already, and now you’re going for a fourth. What is the point to this crap?

First off, if she were serious, she’d pick a damn number and fight for it. She’d have one bill and a strong argument for it. Instead, she takes the file-it-and-forget-it approach. They exist with her name on it, and that’s good enough.

These bills are going nowhere. They exist only so she can put them on her website and in her taxpayer-funded newsletter. They’re not even political grandstanding, which I can at least appreciate as spectacle; they’re tokenism. A slight nod at fiscal responsibility so she doesn’t have to put any actual work into it.

Hey, Rep. Blackburn, are you actually going to fight to control spending or is this it? File the same pointless bills every two years until you retire?

You Say You'll Change the Constitution, Well, You Know...

The states want federal money to put people to work on roads, school repairs, and other infrastructure projects. Too bad the federal government is broke too. The difference is, most states are constitutionally required to have a balanced budget (Tennessee included) while the federal government can spend, spend, spend endlessly on credit.

The GOP used to demand a Constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget. It was one of many things I agreed with them on. Whatever happened to that? Deficit spending should require a two-thirds vote in Congress. That way we can do it in times of desperation, like now, but not just on the whim of an idiot president.

By the Way...

We currently pay $260 billion (or a quarter of a trillion) in interest alone on the national debt every year. That’s 12% of the total budget.

A Little Perspective

If we were to entirely eliminate:

• $10.6 billion - United States Department of the Interior
• $10.5 billion - United States Department of Labor
• $8.4 billion - Social Security Administration
• $7.1 billion - United States Environmental Protection Agency
• $6.9 billion - National Science Foundation
• $6.3 billion - Judicial branch (United States federal courts)
• $4.7 billion - Legislative branch (United States Congress)
• $4.7 billion - United States Army Corps of Engineers
• $0.4 billion - Executive Office of the President
• $0.7 billion - Small Business Administration
• $7.2 billion - Other agencies
• $39.0 billion - Other Off-budget Discretionary Spending

We’ve still only reached just over $100 billion or one-tenth of the deficit. On we go:

• $44.8 billion - United States Department of Veterans Affairs
• $38.5 billion - United States Department of Housing and Urban Development
• $38.3 billion - State and Other International Programs
• $37.6 billion - United States Department of Homeland Security
• $25.0 billion - United States Department of Energy
• $20.8 billion - United States Department of Agriculture
• $20.3 billion - United States Department of Justice
• $17.6 billion - National Aeronautics and Space Administration
• $12.5 billion - United States Department of the Treasury
• $11.5 billion - United States Department of Transportation

If we eliminate all of these departments too, we’re at $373 billion, or just over a third of the deficit. So we keep cutting:

• $70.4 billion - United States Department of Health and Human Services
• $59.2 billion - United States Department of Education

$503 billion! Halfway there...

• $515.4 billion - United States Department of Defense
• $145.2 billion - Global War on Terror

Um... that’s all that’s left. Defense and the War on Terror. And we’d have to pretty much eliminate those entirely to close the gap.

Right now we’re running nearly one-third of the entire federal government on borrowed money. That is not sustainable. That is a destined to collapse.

$1,000,000,000,000

A one trillion dollar budget deficit in 2009! The entire 2009 federal budget (as submitted by President Bush) is only $3.1 trillion! Holy crap!

That’s what President-elect Obama will inherit, thanks the President Bush’s reckless mismanagement of the federal government, taxes, and economic policy.

The AP describes it pretty well:

While nobody likes a deficit, many economists agree that heavy federal government spending—on food stamps or unemployment benefits or public works projects—may be necessary to keep economies moving in times of recession or war.

The problem is that this time Washington was racking up massive deficits even before the current economic downturn.

We can’t cut government assistance in this economy. We can’t cut anything that would result in significant government layoffs. So the deficit explodes…

If President Bush wants to do what’s best for his country, he’ll immediately start recommending specific cuts to the military budget since these are best received when they come from a Republican (the “only Nixon could go to China” philosophy). Obama, as a Democrat, can then tackle non-military spending cuts.

However, spending cuts can only get us so far. In fact, they’re a drop in the bucket compared to $1 trillion deficit. We’re not talking about trimming the fat here; we’re talking about nearly one third of the entire federal government being financed by deficits.

We’d have to eliminate one third of the federal government to catch up. It’s almost beyond comprehension what that means.

PS: Maybe President-elect Obama bought himself a little political capital on military spending cuts by keeping Gates as Secretary of Defense. If Gates gives the green light to certain cuts, that might help. Perhaps Obama understood that he need the credibility of a Republican Secretary of Defense to do what needs to be done, not just for defense spending but for bringing our troops home.