There was a quaint little debate over a spending bill in Congress earlier this week, but most Americans probably never heard about it because it wasn’t the kind of headline-grabbing stuff of, say, another corporation defrauding its investors. What was interesting about it, though, was not the constitutional substance of the debate but rather the lack of it.
On Wednesday, a group of fiscal-conservative Republicans in the House made several attempts to block a $19.8 billion spending bill for the Department of Interior because, they said, it was $900 million more than the White House had requested.
Granted, when politicians are talking about spending in excess of one-fifth of the total annual U.S. gross domestic product – the White House’s budget is more than $2 trillion – something less than $20 billion seems insignificant at best.
But this is not about dollar amounts per se. It is a matter of what really does constitute a legitimate and legal expenditure of the people’s money – a point often lost on most lawmakers.
The crux of the issue to the fiscal conservatives was this: If lawmakers agreed to overspend on the smallish Interior Department budget, what would stop them from trying to overspend on other line items – even if by a little bit? Pretty soon, they argued, all those “little” amounts of excess spending would add up to a whole lot of excess spending – which happens often enough in Washington, as our national debt will attest.
“All we’re trying to do is stick within the president’s request,” proclaimed fellow penny pincher Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., in defending the actions of his fiscally conservative colleagues.
And, in what surely will become the congressional understatement of the year, Rep. John Shadegg, fellow Arizona Republican, added (with a straight face): “Spending is running out of control in this Congress.”
Well, yes, it is. But then again, Congress has been spending far too much of the people’s money for far too many years.
In the end, the fiscal conservatives may get constituents to shave a few bucks off of the Interior spending bill. Overall, however, the 535 men and women of Congress and one president will join forces sometime this fall to spend more money next year than entire continents will spend.
It’s true that the Interior spending bill debate is refreshingly quaint and old-fashioned. But what is equally true is that quaint as it is, it does not mask the obscenity of collecting and spending $2 trillion a year.
What’s worse is the fact that there is no end in sight, because the mindset of the modern American politician regarding the budget is that it’s OK to raid the hapless taxpayer in order to redistribute wealth in an effort to buy off constituencies and remain in power.
The process has made our government so large as to be unsustainable. Eventually, like those corporations guilty of defrauding investors and shareholders, the government will crush itself under the barrels of its own red ink – and the world’s economy will evaporate with it.
It is absolutely insane for Americans to tolerate a federal government that consumes so much of what we produce, only to fritter it away on programs, entitlements and other “benefits” that we should be paying for ourselves – if we even want them.
Heaven help us when this gravy train crashes and burns, because millions of Americans used to living off the public dole will have to resort to unsavory behavior just to stay alive. They won’t know any other way because Uncle Sam has turned them into helpless, hopeless, useless dependents.
Syria and America’s bloody diplomacy
Mike Pottage