Latest numbers released on Congress!

If you are wondering if this column is about your particular members of Congress, the answer is yes!

No, I am not psychic, but I am referring to your member of the House of Representatives and your two senators.

The new VoteTally report on the last Congress – just released this morning by the National Taxpayers Union Foundation – cuts through all the rhetoric and pulls back the curtain. Every member of the 107th Congress – regardless of political party – fell neatly into the “big spender” category.

Although a few members of the 107th have departed, the cast of characters in the 108th Congress is essentially the same. Therefore, the old cry of “Throw the bums out” is somehow insufficient.

For the first time, since NTU began keeping these records, not one lawmaker supported a net reduction in Washington’s bloated budget – not one!

For the record: A new Congress is organized every two years, after each congressional election. In January, the second session of the 108th Congress begins.

Every two years, NTU painstakingly analyzes every vote taken in the previous Congress that would raise or lower federal spending by a million dollars or more. Bear in mind, the bill doesn’t have to pass to be counted, but these votes make up the true spending records for all 435 members of the House and all 100 senators.

While there was a lot of talk about getting a handle on federal spending, not one member has a record to match his or her rhetoric. A review of the Congressional Record revealed that lawmakers talked about getting a handle on federal spending no less than 1,795 times.

As the old saying goes, liars figure but figures don’t lie and the figures are shocking, particularly for the Republicans. After spending the better part of 40 years in the minority wilderness, unable to do anything more than moan about the ballooning federal budget, the GOP finally got its chance to change things, after Republicans were propelled into the leadership position in the 1994 election with the “Contract with America.”

The fresh faces, who characterized the 104th Congress, were carrying the mantle of Ronald Reagan who correctly stated, “Government is the problem, not the solution.” They had a mandate from the people and they were determined to cut Washington down to size.

Even Democrats – who traditionally supported the “nanny state” and sought to pass new and bigger government programs – began jumping onboard the wagon of fiscal restraint. By 1996 – second session of the 104th Congress – a full 512 out of the 535 members of Congress had a record that reduced, not increased, overall discretionary outlays.

Then, a funny thing happened. After fighting the Clinton administration to hold down spending and passing a plan that was designed to reach balance and eliminate the deficit, they began to party.

As leaders in Congress, they were first in line at the feeding trough and they just could not resist chowing down. When the stock-market bubble produced an unexpected windfall, instead of banking some of the surplus for the inevitable rainy day and returning the rest to taxpayers, they began soaking up those excess funds as fast as they came in.

When the recession began near the end of the Clinton administration, it was too late. Like the Democrats before them, Republicans, too, had become spending addicts.

The votes cast by the average House member of the 107th would effectively raise discretionary spending alone by $192.3 billion per year. The net effect of the votes cast by the average member of the Senate represented an increase of $256.9 billion per year. That’s an increase of 825 percent and 431 percent respectively from the votes of the average member of the 105th Congress.

The net effect of the votes on discretionary spending cast by House Republicans actually outpaced their Democrat colleagues in each of the last three Congresses. The average House Republican’s net spending total is a whopping 1,066 percent higher in the 107th Congress than in the 105th ($200.5 billion compared to $17.2 billion).

To be fair, NTU ran the numbers again, backing out the costs related to the 9-11 attack on this country and the war on terror and discovered that 85 percent of the increases are in no way attributable to Sept. 11.

This behavior is inexcusable and simply cannot be sustained by American taxpayers. The question is: What are you going to do about it?