Posted by
Buster Foghorn on Thursday, October 02, 2008 12:41:23 PM
After the House votes down the latest version of the “Paulson Plan,” the Senate rushes to promote a financial package that grows from around 100 pages in the House to over 450 pages in the Senate, adding a variety of earmarks, including money for wooden arrowheads and wool research, tax extenders, psychiatric health care insurance and rural school aid, without offsetting spending cuts, pushing the price for the bailout package towards one trillion dollars.
Foreshadowing this breakdown in financial discipline, this gross abandonment of duty, this gorging at the public trough, was the Continuing Resolution passed last week for over $600 billion with over 2,200 earmarks attached and totaling over $6 billion.
If the financial bailout is critical, if we are facing a financial event comparable to the Great Depression, if we are on the precipice of financial ruin looking into the abyss, then, is this the best the world’s most deliberative body can do – pile on more spending, congratulating themselves for their action ahead of the House, pushing through their pet provisions, preempting the House Republican alternative, involving less debt for the taxpayer?
At this point, how anyone can believe our political class is fit to lead is beyond me. President Bush, as his term of office comes to a close, says, we are facing critical times – it isn’t the bailout that is critical, however, it is the refusal of elected officials to perform their duties in a responsible manner, their unwillingness to curb their appetite for more money at taxpayer expense, their unwillingness to accept a reality that requires fiscal discipline and setting priorities, their belief they are entitled to an unlimited right to draw upon the public’s funds to push any fantasy ideology they can imagine to create heaven on earth based on government largesse.
Our next President will begin his term with a very different set of givens than most could have imagined just a year ago. If Senator McCain is serious about changing Washington, if he is serious about being a reformer, if he is serious about eliminating earmarks, the Republican Presidential nominee from Arizona needs to start making earmark piggy’s – especially those who have moved beyond earmarks as a gateway drug to an addiction – famous. Now.