Yesterday the House Republican Conference swore off earmarks by adopting a unilateral ban on all earmarks:
House Republicans approved a conference-wide moratorium on earmarks on Thursday, one day after a House committee enacted a ban on for-profit earmarks.
The Republicans’ moratorium is more extensive than the House Appropriations Committee’s ban in that it applies to all earmarks for all members of the caucus.
The moratorium was passed via a “strong” voice vote, according to Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas), who participated in the nearly two-hour-long conference meeting.
Republicans had discussed enacting a ban in the last Congress, but a vote never materialized.
Does this mean that Republicans, after years of profligate spending, have suddenly realized fiscal principles? Probably not.
The beauty of a competitive political system is that the public, by hounding politicians long enough, can eventually force them to make the right choice for the wrong reasons. Sure, some of the people involved have taken principled stands against earmarks consistently, but by and large Republicans just want back in power, and they’re doing what they have to do to court voters.
Just remember, they’ll betray these same principles the minute they get back into power if you let them. That’s why the public has to stay informed, engaged and outspoken.
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The productive sector of the economy is having to shoulder quite the burden when it comes to paying the salaries for their “public sector” cohorts, who USA Today finds are excessively compensated:
Federal employees earn higher average salaries than private-sector workers in more than eight out of 10 occupations, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data finds.
…Overall, federal workers earned an average salary of $67,691 in 2008 for occupations that exist both in government and the private sector, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The average pay for the same mix of jobs in the private sector was $60,046 in 2008, the most recent data available.
…These salary figures do not include the value of health, pension and other benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee in 2008 vs. $9,882 per private worker, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Federal workers earn considerably more pay for performing the same job as those in the private sector. Unless they are equally more productive, the difference is pure waste. Keep in mind that it’s the private sector workers who pay the salary of their public sector counterparts.
Similar studies at the state and local level, such as this one by Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute, have found the same results.
The job on USA Today’s list with the biggest pay gap is that of public relations manager, where government employees earn over $44k more than equivalent private sector workers. In this case it might actually be deserved, as making big government look good is an impossible task.
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More market manipulation coming from the Obama White House:
The Obama administration is planning to use the government’s enormous buying power to prod private companies to improve wages and benefits for millions of workers, according to White House officials and several interest groups briefed on the plan.
By altering how it awards $500 billion in contracts each year, the government would disqualify more companies with labor, environmental or other violations and give an edge to companies that offer better levels of pay, health coverage, pensions and other benefits, the officials said.
Critics also said the policy would put small businesses, many of which do not provide rich benefits, at a disadvantage. Furthermore, government officials would find it difficult to evaluate bidders using the new criteria and to determine whether one company’s compensation package should give it an edge, said Alan L. Chvotkin, executive vice president of the Professional Services Council, a coalition of 340 government contractors.
From his earliest days in office, President Obama has called for an overhaul of government procurement policy, citing the contracting scandals of the previous decade involving cost overruns and no-bid contracts.
“The president made it clear that he is committed to reforming government contracts to save taxpayers money while protecting workers and the environment,” a White House spokesman, Bill Burton, said. “The administration is currently gathering data and examining the best ways to do this.”
Spending more for labor cannot save money, so that’s just silly.
More people will continue to enter the middle class as their labor produces more. However, by simply paying them more of the taxpayers money regardless of the productivity of their labor means draining money from the middle class. Economically this is nothing more than a different type of redistribution scheme.
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Writing in the Wall Street Journal today, Congressmen Mike Pence and Jeb Hensarling lay out how we can wrangle government and get it under control:
Fiscal storm clouds are upon us. In five years, federal spending has skyrocketed to 24.7% from 19.9% of our economy. That’s the highest level since World War II. Borrowing has ballooned the national debt to $11.9 trillion from $7.3 trillion, a five-year increase equal to the accumulation of debt between President George Washington and President Bill Clinton.
Unfortunately, the long-term fiscal picture is worse. As the Baby Boom generation retires and the cost of health care continues to escalate, entitlement programs will cause federal spending to rise to 40% of our economy, double its post-World War II average. This is assuming that spending does not increase even further, an assumption that the trillion-dollar “stimulus” bill and the 84% increase in nondefense discretionary spending President Obama signed into law argues against.
Their proposal:
Winston Churchill once said that “Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.” We’ve exhausted the possibilities. Now it’s time to do the right thing.
That is why we are proposing a Spending Limit Amendment to the Constitution. This amendment would limit spending to one-fifth of the economy (our historical spending average since World War II). The limit could only be waived by a declaration of war or by a two-thirds congressional vote.
As with other constitutional amendments, Congress would be given the authority to enforce and implement it. But for the first time, the federal government would have a limit on its size and scope. The Spending Limit Amendment does not promise a particular spending plan about what programs to restrain and by how much. Rather, it puts a legal constraint on lawmakers present and future.
As ideas go this is a pretty good one. Constitutional amendments are very difficult to pass, though. Can the Tea Party movement rally around this idea and make November a referendum on it? It’s possible, but I’m not sure how that could be enough.
Republicans would have to run the table just to get a Senate majority. It’s not possible for them to win the 66 votes needs to pass a Constitutional amendment. And no matter how scared they are, I just don’t see any Democrats voting for this. It would mean the end of their tax and spend racket, and would force them to deal with the growing fiscal crises of Medicare and Social Security.
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One of the biggest applause lines at CPAC not involving a chalk board was when Rep. Mike Pence called for an end to all federal funding for Planned Parenthood. It’s not just that the organization performs abortions, as other pro-life lines didn’t get the same level of enthusiastic response. It’s that the organization is as morally and legally corrupt as ACORN.
Video via Blogger of the Year Ed Morrissey at HotAir:
The film was produced by Lila Rose and Live Action Films, who have now exposed criminal behavior at multiple Planned Parenthood locations.
This is the kind of raw journalism we need, like what James O’Keefe did with ACORN. The traditional press won’t do it. They refuse to expose the organization that make up the base of the Democratic Party. We have to do it ourselves. Kudos to these people for exposing such corruption of our taxpayer dollars.
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White House holds closed workshop on government openness.
You can’t make this stuff up. Ok, maybe you can. But I can’t. I’m just not that funny.
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I guess we know what the ‘create’ in “save or create” refers to:
Just how big is the stimulus package? Well for one, it has doubled the size of the House of Representatives, according to recovery.gov, which says that funds were distributed to 440 congressional districts that do not exist.
According to data retrieved from recovery.gov, nearly $6.4 billion was used to “create or save” just under 30,000 jobs in these phantom congressional districts–almost $225,000 per job. The web site operates on an $84 million budget and is tasked with monitoring the distribution of the $787 billion stimulus package passed by Congress–which, for the record, counts 435 members–in early 2009.
The site’s monitors, however, are not too savvy about America’s political or geographic landscape. More than $2 million was given to the 99th District of North Dakota, a state which has only one congressional district. In order to qualify for 99 districts, North Dakota would have to have a population of about 60 million people, almost 24 million more people than California.
More from Watchdog.org.
Update: The Washington Examiner is tracking inflated numbers on the supposed impact of the stimulus, and finds that “more than ten percent of the jobs the Obama administration has claimed were ‘created or saved’ by the $787 billion stimulus package are doubtful or imaginary, according to reports compiled from eleven major newspapers and the Associated Press.”
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Single issue organizations often try to piggy-back on the big issues of the day and gain publicity by tying major news items to their agenda. I can hardly fault them for it, but when they use bad logic in an effort to restrict freedoms, I must call them out.
Members of Congress who noted “no” on health care reform legislation late Saturday night have received $2.3 million more in campaign donations from health insurance interests than those who voted in favor of the legislation to overhaul of the nation’s health care system, according to analysis released by a coalition of campaign reform groups.
“The health care debate shows that our campaign finance system is as much in crisis as our health care system,” said David Donnelly, national campaigns director of Public Campaign Action Fund, the watchdog group that conducted the analysis for the coalition. “As measured in campaign donations, it clearly pays to be against reform and with the health insurance interests.”
There are several problems with this hyperventilating account of their findings. First, the difference in donations for the two sides isn’t all that great. One group got $12.5 and the other closer to $10 million. Yet clearly they want to paint it as nefarious to donate to people opposing PelosiCare, but it’s no problem for those who support it.
Which brings me to my second point. They are wrong to assert that the “vote shows the need to transform our current campaign finance system.” Their idea of transforming campaign finance is to restrict the freedom to financially support politicians on the basis of their views, and they argue this is necessary by inferring, but not substantiating, corruption when it comes to voting on health care reform. But their claim that it “clearly pays to be against reform” misses the point: it clearly pays to be on either side of the issue. The $2.3 million difference between being for or against the legislation is minimal compared to the $10+ million difference between not having and having a piece of controversial legislation to vote on in the first place.
Whether they are for or against the particular bills before Congress, both sides are financially better off for having the debate at all. The incentive then is not to switch sides for money, but to threaten governmental interference in all manner of issues, and as often as possible, in order to create more anxiety in the private sector. Every additional “crises” that needs “reform” will bring out new stakeholders with buckets full of cash who want to make sure they don’t get shafted in the process.
Restricting donations is not likely to work. Because both sides – industries who want favorable regulations and politicians who want money with which to seek reelection – are highly motivated to get around any restrictions, they are unlikely to stop the flow of money. New ways will always emerge for it to get from pocket A into pocket B.
The best solution is not to limit our freedoms, but to limit the powers of Congress. The fewer issues that are within their regulatory purview, the fewer opportunities they have to go around kicking ant mounds in hopes of seeing which deep pockets get stirred up.
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Just imagine how many sex scandals could be going at the same time with 2 or 3 times as many Congress-critters:
Here’s the deal: On Thursday, a group called Apportionment.us filed suit in federal district court for the Northern District of Mississippi on behalf of five people, one resident from each of the following states: Montana, Delaware, Mississippi, South Dakota, and Utah. The quintet’s complaint: that their votes carry far less weight in the House of Representatives than do those from residents of other sates, like Rhode Island and Iowa.
The group alleges this is the case because the population variance between the most under-represented congressional district in the nation and most over-represented district exceeds 80%. For example, according to the complaint, Montana has one representative for every approximately 905,000 people while its neighbor to the south, Wyoming, has one representative for approximately every 495,000 people. (The suit deals only with the House, not the Senate where, of course, residents of Montana have far more representation, per capita, than do residents of nearly every other state.)
The group is now trumpeting the fact that a three judge panel was immediately ordered to consider the case.
I don’t know much about the legal merits of this argument. I’m skeptical that this is an issue that the courts ought to be addressing. The size of the House of Representatives is set by statute, not the Constitution.
As for the idea itself, the idea of expanding the House of Representatives is not new. It is worthy of consideration, though, as there is no denying that a growing population and a stagnant House has vastly increased the number of citizens represented by each member. This has arguably affected just how much the House is truly “the people’s House.”
If the House were to be expanded, either by passing new law or from a court order, there will be a difficult transition period. The Capital would not be big enough for the new body. Nor would there be sufficient office space in the surrounding area. And I can only imagine how ugly the political battles over crafting the new districts would get.
Update: On a related note, an analysis from liberal leaning FiveThirtyEight thinks an expansion of the House would favor Democrats, because (in the current political make-up) they win more larger states and Republicans win more smaller states. The logic looks sound to me.
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A Washington Post editorial takes up the issue of legislators reading bills before they are passed. Noting the pledge hosted by ReadToVote.org, the authors worry that, “their proposal would bring government to a standstill.”
Considering it merely as a practical matter, I don’t mind Congressmen delegating some of that responsibility to staff. But the argument isn’t just that Congressmen didn’t personally read cap-and-trade, for instance, while their staff did; it’s that no one, staff included, could have possibly read it in the time it was amended and passed. Without anyone having time to read it, there is no way it was understood when it was voted on. That is a gross dereliction of duty.
Yet from an ideological perspective, I support making the Congressmen read it themselves because I want government to be brought to a standstill (using WaPo’s slightly hyperbolic description). Modern day government is clearly lacking in deliberation, and anything that forces them to do more of it, or to write smaller, more comprehensible legislation, is a good thing.
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I am a libertarian-conservative blogger living in the DC area. I have a Master's degree in Political Science, but please don't hold that against me.
