As part of the GOP\u2019s campaign \u201cPledge to America\u201d last fall, the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives promised to roll back federal spending to 2008 levels, a move which could involve cutting as much as $84 billion from nine appropriations bills — cuts that would average 18 percent below President Obama\u2019s budget recommendations for 2011.<\/p>\n
And they have the votes to do it.<\/p>\n
The Associated Press reported last week \u201cThe vote will be largely symbolic. The actual cuts would have to be made in appropriations bills that would have to clear a 60-vote hurdle in the Senate, where Republicans hold only 47 seats.\u201d<\/p>\n
Um … what? If it takes 60 votes to guarantee passage of any spending bill in the Senate, and Senate Republicans have 47 votes, then Senate Republicans can block 53 Democrats from passing any spending bill the Republicans don\u2019t like.<\/p>\n
Democrats can threaten to \u201cshut down the government\u201d all they like — if 47 Senate Republicans refuse to approve any spending bill allocating a dollar more than the House version, that spending bill cannot pass, any more than the federal government can continue spending at current rates much past March if Republicans simply refuse to raise the \u201cdebt ceiling.\u201d<\/p>\n
Republicans have the votes to start reducing actual spending, right now. If they really wanted to.<\/p>\n
According to The AP, if Republicans take the scissors to $1 of every $6 spent by agencies like the IRS, the FBI, NASA and the National Park Service, \u201cFederal layoffs would be unavoidable, the White House warns.\u201d<\/p>\n
Well, as they used to say about the hundred lawyers at the bottom of Lake Mead, \u201cIt\u2019s a start.\u201d<\/p>\n
In fact, such numbers only indicate how ridiculously the federal government has continued to grow over the past three years, even as private-sector Americans suffered through a Great Recession which has left storefronts vacant across the land.<\/p>\n
In truth, a cutback to 2008 levels is a disappointingly modest goal. It still won\u2019t put the nation in the black. Given that the volume of predictable Democratic squawking about \u201cstarving old people\u201d now measures about 8 on a scale of 10, it\u2019s hard to imagine how resistance could have been much intense had Republicans just taken a bigger bite, vowed to slash spending to the level of 1988, or even 1958.<\/p>\n
In fact, the Republican Study Committee has proposed more serious cuts, totaling $2.5 trillion over the next decade. Though such numbers pale beside what would happen if the GOP REALLY stopped allowing federal spending on any thing not authorized in the Constitution, starting with \u201cforeign aid\u201d and all domestic tax-funded \u201ccharity\u201d or \u201cwelfare.\u201d<\/p>\n
But let us now cue the wailing and the gnashing of teeth. If spending is rolled back, \u201cLow-income students may get smaller grants and the newly disabled might have to wait longer for their benefits,\u201d reports the \u201capolitical\u201d AP.<\/p>\n
\u201cA return to 2008 levels would mean significant cuts for lots of programs favored by Republicans, including an 8 percent cut to NASA, a 16 percent cut for the FBI and a 13 percent cut in the operating budget of the national parks,\u201d The AP warns. And \u201cThere are other political land mines,\u201d including \u201cbig cuts looming for the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, known as LIHEAP, which provides home heating subsidies to the poor. \u201c<\/p>\n
Those cuts mean \u201ca lot of people who aren\u2019t able to pay their heating bills are going to have no way to heat their homes — or they\u2019re going to have to decide to eat less or see the doctor less,\u201d explains former Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., who retired last year after orchestrating a doubling of the program\u2019s budget — from $2.5 billion to $5 billion — since 2008.<\/p>\n
But where in the Constitution is the Congress authorized to allocate a single penny of the tax payments of Americans from Florida and Arizona to subsidize the home heating costs of people who voluntarily choose to live in Minnesota, Wisconsin and the Dakotas? Will the cheeseheads reciprocate by buying their southern neighbors free lemonade next summer?<\/p>\n
For that matter, if former Congressman Obey was so concerned about the cost of home heating oil, instead of addicting his constituents to new federal handouts which will only help drive prices higher, why didn\u2019t he long ago use his high position in the Congress to cut through the red tape and authorize construction of a dozen new oil refineries in these United States, not tom mention drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and along the entire continental shelf?<\/p>\n
\u201cLawmakers in both parties from rural districts are likely to resist what could be an almost 20 percent cut to a program that subsidizes service by smaller airlines to isolated cities and towns like Scottsbluff, Neb., and Burlington, Iowa,\u201d The AP reports.<\/p>\n
Oh, the humanity!<\/p>\n
Even those who claim the Congress can do anything necessary to advance \u201cthe general welfare\u201d (it can\u2019t) might have some trouble explaining what\u2019s so \u201cgeneral\u201d about the benefits of providing extra travel convenience to a few isolated towns so small most folks couldn\u2019t find them on a map.<\/p>\n
Nor can anyone find a single word in Article I Section 8 justifying federal aid to local school districts, or financing from Washington for the Women, Infants and Children program — undertakings safely left to the states or to local churches and charities for the first two centuries of the Republic\u2019s existence.<\/p>\n
If anything is proven by the statistics now churning forth, about all the millions of \u201cbeneficiaries\u201d who will be harmed by even these modest proposed cuts, it\u2019s just how successful the state-socialists have been in creating \u201cprograms\u201d supposedly tailored to the limited needs of small groups of sufferers, and then promptly expanding their \u201cclient base\u201d until there\u2019s no one in America who can\u2019t be somehow \u201charmed\u201d by any attempts to roll back federal spending before it bankrupts us all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As part of the GOP\u2019s campaign \u201cPledge to America\u201d last fall, the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives promised to roll back federal spending to 2008 levels, a move which could involve cutting as much as $84 billion from nine appropriations bills — cuts that would average 18 percent below President Obama\u2019s budget […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[42,17,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2012-election","category-big-brother","category-elections"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-aR","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=673"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":674,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673\/revisions\/674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}