Tag Archives: Keynes

News

Senator Tom Coburn lists some bad examples of government waste

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Here’s the story.

Excerpt:

Coburn, R-Muskogee, whose office regularly churns out reports mocking federal projects and programs, said Monday that “cutting wasteful and low-priority spending from the budget is not only sensible, but essential.”

“In today’s economy, we can’t afford to spend nearly $2 million to showcase neon signs no longer in use at Las Vegas casinos; nor can Congress and federal agencies afford to spend nearly $1 billion a year on unnecessary printing costs.”

The 100 projects cited on Monday tread some familiar ground for Coburn reports — road signs paid for with stimulus funds, research projects that sound like folly — and are mostly domestic. There is no mention of Iraq or Afghanistan, despite government reports documenting millions lost to fraud and waste.

Topping Coburn’s list is the conclusion of a FOX News story that the Department of Veterans Affairs spends $175 million each year to maintain buildings it can’t use, in some cases because they’re in such disrepair.

Other items on the list:

• $217,000 for a University of California and Stanford University study on when and why political candidates are ambiguous.

• $90,000 to fund promotion of the Vidalia onion, including $60,000 for a campaign timed to coincide with the release of a Shrek movie.

•  $2.5 million on the Census Bureau’s television ad that aired during the Super Bowl to promote the head-count but left many viewers scratching their heads in confusion.

• $465,000 for an international AIDS conference in Austria.

• $35 million paid in fraudulent Medicare and Medicaid claims to an alleged Armenian crime ring.

• $48 million for a streetcar system in Atlanta that runs the same route as the city’s subway system.

• $900,000 to settle sexual harassment claims against a former housing director in Philadelphia.

•  And $28 million to print “rarely used” paper copies of the Congressional Record.

Here’s a recent post from the Washington Examiner that compares Democrats and Republicans on pork barrel spending. (H/T Gateway Pundit via Muddling)

Excerpt:

Press coverage of the budget frenzy on Capitol Hill has suggested that pork-barrel earmark spending is still a bipartisan problem, that after months of self-righteous rhetoric about fiscal discipline, Republicans and Democrats remain equal-opportunity earmarkers.

It’s not true. A new analysis by a group of federal-spending watchdogs shows a striking imbalance between the parties when it comes to earmark requests. Democrats remain raging spenders, while Republicans have made enormous strides in cleaning up their act.

In the Senate, the GOP made only one-third as many earmark requests as Democrats for 2011, and in the House, Republicans have nearly given up earmarking altogether — while Democrats roll on.

The watchdog groups — Taxpayers for Common Sense, WashingtonWatch.com, and Taxpayers Against Earmarks — counted total earmark requests in the 2011 budget. Those requests were made by lawmakers earlier this year, but Democratic leaders, afraid that their party’s spending priorities might cost them at the polls, decided not to pass a budget before the Nov. 2 elections. This week, they distilled those earmark requests — threw some out, combined others — into the omnibus bill that was under consideration in the Senate until Majority Leader Harry Reid pulled it Thursday night. While that bill was loaded with spending, looking back at the original earmark requests tells us a lot about the spending inclinations of both parties.

In the 2011 House budget, the groups found that House Democrats requested 18,189 earmarks, which would cost the taxpayers a total of $51.7 billion, while House Republicans requested just 241 earmarks, for a total of $1 billion.

This is why stimulus spending, which is advocated by Democrats, costs jobs. Democrats waste money. They take money out of the job-creating sector of the economy, and they waste on government spending. If private companies wasted money like government, they would go out of business. Unfortunately, government can waste money like this all the time, and they just borrow more money. When you hear a Democrat say that they want to “invest” money they stole from businesses and workers in order to “stimulate” the economy, what they are talking about is wasting money and/or buying votes from their favored special interest groups.

Commentary

How the federal government and stimulus spending discourage work

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A post by Hans Bader at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Excerpt:

Thanks to food stamps, Medicaid, and housing subsidies, and other welfare benefits, many “poor” people have far more disposable income than self-supporting households earning $40,000 to $60,000 a year.  Veronique de Rugy points to a finding that “a one-parent family of three making $14,500 a year (minimum wage) has more disposable income than a family making $60,000 a year” — even excluding benefits from Supplemental Security Income.  “America is now a country which punishes those middle-class people who not only try to work hard, but avoid scamming the system.”

[…]The analysis de Rugy cites actually understates the disincentives to work, because it ignored the fact that many households that are “poor” in terms of taxable income are not poor at all once you factor in tax-free income from non-governmental sources.  For example, child support is tax-free to the recipient family, no matter how huge the payments they receive (for example, a billionaire may pay several million dollars a year in child support to each of his ex-girlfriends with kids, leaving them in tax-free luxury, and under New York’s child support guidelines, everyone is supposed to pay at least 17 percent of their gross income in child support for just one child, regardless of how high that income is.  In Massachusetts, middle-income households pay 25 percent of gross income for just one kid — which is around a third of their after-tax income — under that state’s child support guidelines).

He also talks about how the federal government encourages child support agencies to yank more children away from their parents – they get more funding that way!

Commentary

John Hawkins of Right Wing News interviews Tom Sowell

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Thomas Sowell

Right Wing News has a great interview with my favorite economist, Tom Sowell.

Excerpt:

Paul Krugman is one of the best known and highest regarded economists on the Left. He says the problem we have right now is the government simply is not spending enough money and the fears we have about the debt causing all these major problems are extremely overblown. What do you say to that argument that is very prevalent on the Left?

Well, it’s a heads I win, tails you lose argument because if we spend twice as much for the next ten years and things don’t get any better – you can still say, “We didn’t spend enough.” We should have spent four times as much. And if we spend four times as much, you can say we should spend 10 times as much. It’s an impossible argument to refute.

It just so happens I’ve been reading a statement by Henry Morganfeld, the Secretary of Treasury under FDR, and he made the statement in 1939 — he said, “We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.” Now this is FDR’s closest confidant, the man who has been in charge of the spending — and after six years of it at this point, they have nothing to show for it and in point of fact, unemployment had gotten back up above 20 percent about a month before he made the statement.

Look at this – the man is branching out from fiscal conservatism into social conservatism. He’s not a Christian, so this is pretty awesome.

Excerpt:

Now, you talked a lot about cultural issues in the book. That’s something you’ve gotten more into in your columns lately. In the book you wrote about gay marriage and the comparison between gay marriage and interracial marriage. Why do you think that’s a bad comparison and what do you say to the argument that gay Americans have a right, perhaps even a constitutional right to get married?

Well, my Constitution must be out of date because I haven’t seen it there. It’s one of many things, such as the separation of church and state, that I’ve never seen there.

Marriage is not a right. Marriage is an imposition of a government’s interest in certain unions. Probably because those unions produce children, but for other reasons, too. Otherwise people could marry or not marry utterly independently of the government.

But what we’re talking about is not gay marriage. We’re talking about redefining marriage through the convenience of leaders who speak for the gays. And I don’t see any more reason for doing that than for allowing bigamists to redefine marriage to suit their convenience.

And you can read Tom Sowell’s latest column on FDR and the Great Depression here. He talks about how the policies of President Roosevely failed to lower unemployment and how they mirror the policies of Obama and the Democrats today.