The Coburn Amendment

[Balta1701]

I think pigs may very well be flying somewhere today. Why? Right Now, Congress is about to shoot down an amendment offered by Senator Tom Coburn which actually has received support both from Instapundit and from Daily Kos.

 

What does the amendment do? If it passes, it will kill the "Don Young Way" bridge and the other bridge in Alaska to the island with 50 people, and it would transfer the money to rebuild a bridge in New Orleans.

 

Congress is going to brutally vote this bill down. Why? Because no Congressperson wants to have his or her own pork projects treated the same way as those obnoxious ones given to Alaska. They rely on these funds to keep themselves in office, and they're not going to give them up without a fight.

 

Keep an eye on the voting rolls in these sorts of fights. They're good things to base your next round of donations or votes on.

 

I believe that it looks like only a handfull of Senators actually voted yes on the thing.

 

Tom Coburn (R-OK)

Russ Feingold (D-WI)

Jon Kyl (R-AZ)

Jim DeMint (R-SC)

David Vitter (R-LA)

Mary Landrieu (D-LA)

John Sununu (R-NH)

Lindsey Graham (R-SC)

Richard Burr (R-NC)

Wayne Allard (R-CO)

Jeff Sessions (R-AL)

Evan Bayh (D-IN)

Mike DeWine (R-OH)

Kent Conrad (D-ND)

George Allen (R-VA)

 

Russ Feingold will probably be a Democratic Presidential Candidate in 2008. He just helped his case in my book.

 

Edit: When both the Sierra Club and the Club For Growth are actually on the same page on a bill...wow. Congress is really hoping we won't notice this thing going down in flames.

 

Edit 2: That's the final list. Hi Evan!

Edited October 21, 2005 by Balta1701

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

One thing that really burns my ass about Congress ( and this goes for both parties ) is their complete disregard for spending discipline. There seem to be fewer and fewer members of Congress who care about the fiscal health of this country and thats very troubling. When are they going to realize that buying votes with pork and spiraling entitlement programs is going to bankrupt this country?

 

 

One thing that really bugs me about the Bush Administration is that every time something comes up that we need to take care of ( I.E. Disaster relief this year ) the answer is always..........borrow it.

 

 

I want to see a Congress that shows some integrity and passes a budget that cuts spending across the board with no program or outlay sacrosanct except for interest on the debt. The government has to learn to do more with less because even after the tax cuts of the last 5 years this country is still overtaxed and I don't believe that the government has any right to ask its citizens for more until they prove to us that they aren't just going to waste it all.

[Balta1701]

Naturally I disagree with Nuke on the "This country is still overtaxed" principle...but when Nuke and Balta both agree on a bill and Congress won't pass it...eesh.

[Balta1701]

One thing that really bugs me about the Bush Administration is that every time something comes up that we need to take care of ( I.E. Disaster relief this year ) the answer is always..........borrow it.

Actually Nuke, this brings up what I consider a very interesting point, in that there are some things that as a nation we would probably actually want to borrow in order to pay off. One of the ideal candidates for borrowing would be in something like disaster reconstruction.

 

If we put $100 billion (give or take a factor of 3) or so into New Orleans, we'd be doing so as an investment, because there's some economic value in having New Orleans exist as it did before, and if it were back, it would generate economic growth and tax revenues which would pay us back. For this reason, a time of a disaster is exactly the time you'd want to consider deficit spending.

 

Think about your average person spending money. If he or she were to rack up an $10,000 credit card bill just doing normal shopping, what would they do if a disaster struck them? A car accident or something requiring a large outlay of cash in order to get through short term difficulties? They'd basically be screwed, because there's only so much borrowing that can be done.

 

The problem here is not the borrowing to pay for Katrina. The problem here is the structural deficit we've created through 4 straight years of record spending growth combined with 4 years of tax cuts. That has led us to the point where our only solution is borrowing...because we've been borrowing for everything else. We've basically been the guy paying his gas bill on his maxed out credit card and hoping that nothing bad would happen. Well, something bad did happen, it's time for some deficit spending, but our credit card is virtually maxed out.

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

Actually Nuke, this brings up what I consider a very interesting point, in that there are some things that as a nation we would probably actually want to borrow in order to pay off.  One of the ideal candidates for borrowing would be in something like disaster reconstruction.

 

If we put $100 billion (give or take a factor of 3) or so into New Orleans, we'd be doing so as an investment, because there's some economic value in having New Orleans exist as it did before, and if it were back, it would generate economic growth and tax revenues which would pay us back.  For this reason, a time of a disaster is exactly the time you'd want to consider deficit spending.

 

Think about your average person spending money.  If he or she were to rack up an $10,000 credit card bill just doing normal shopping, what would they do if a disaster struck them?  A car accident or something requiring a large outlay of cash in order to get through short term difficulties?  They'd basically be screwed, because there's only so much borrowing that can be done.

 

The problem here is not the borrowing to pay for Katrina.  The problem here is the structural deficit we've created through 4 straight years of record spending growth combined with 4 years of tax cuts.  That has led us to the point where our only solution is borrowing...because we've been borrowing for everything else.  We've basically been the guy paying his gas bill on his maxed out credit card and hoping that nothing bad would happen.  Well, something bad did happen, it's time for some deficit spending, but our credit card is virtually maxed out.

 

I agree with defecit spending when there is some reason to believe that the expense will be recouped. There is no chance of that happening with this government.

 

We gotta start cutting spending across the board and we have got to get our fiscal house in order. You are spot on with your maxed out credit card theory BTW.

[KipWellsFan]

Mary Landrieu (R-LA)

 

Mary Landrieu (D-LA), isn't that right?

[Balta1701]

Mary Landrieu (D-LA), isn't that right?

Correct. I stole that list from Club for Growth and I wasn't watching. Will be corrected shortly.

[Benchwarmerjim]

interesting stuff

 

I wrote a letter last April to both my Senators (Coleman and Dayton) regarding Fiscal Discipline and why doesnt Congress use that notion very much anymore and they both sent me standard pre-written 'why thank you for writing, here is my record' responses.

[southsider2k5]

It doesn't surprise me at all to see Evan Bayh's name on there. He has his eyes on the oval office, and being apart of a bill like this is a great thing to be able to campaign on.

 

It is also items like this that make me wonder if a line item veto wouldn't be so bad of a thing...

[EvilMonkey]

A line item veto would be a GREAT thing, assuming whatever President that was in charge had the balls to actually use it.

[Benchwarmerjim]

LOL

--

 

WASHINGTON - Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, vowed Thursday to resign from the Senate if his fellow lawmakers followed through on threats to cancel spending on a $230 million "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska that was stuck into a pork-filled highway bill earlier this year.

 

The bridge, longer than the Golden Gate, would cross from Ketchikan (pop. 8,000) to Gravina Island (pop. 50), replacing a seven-minute ferry that connects the town with the regional airport. Its main critic, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., argued that the bridge money is enough to buy each island resident a Lear jet.

 

The bridge, and Stevens' success in preserving it, illustrates a trend in Congress, where lawmakers lard spending bills with pet projects worth tens of millions of dollars.

 

Many of them are obscure, such as $1 million to research household plants in Utah's desert climates. Many are popular with lawmakers' constituents, such as $500,000 for an Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle or a museum parking lot in Omaha, Neb.

 

 

more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/krwashbureau/20051...ongress_spend_1

[southsider2k5]

Good. Resign. Get the f*** out of the senate. We don't need those kind of people in it anyway.

[Balta1701]

Many of them are obscure, such as $1 million to research household plants in Utah's desert climates.

See, now these are the ones I hate to hear people complain about...when media/anti-government folks go and peruse the list of projects that the NSF or NASA or someone similar is giving a lot of money to during a year, find a way to present it in a small blurb, and make it sound terrible.

 

On things like that, we often have no idea what the actual goal is. Maybe the idea behind the project is that we could use the plants to consume CO2 and fight global warming, or we could use it to improve the climate in the desert, or maybe there's something genetically distinct about those plants.

 

In almost all cases, I think it's fairly foolish to just cherry pick reserach funding proposals that "Sound" silly and criticize them without taking the time to read the full funding proposal that earned the grant. Who knows what the final goal there is...it may very well be more than worth the money.

[LowerCaseRepublican]

I can only hope this is a promise and not a threat...

 

WASHINGTON - Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, vowed Thursday to resign from the Senate if his fellow lawmakers followed through on threats to cancel spending on a $230 million "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska that was stuck into a pork-filled highway bill earlier this year.