Re: taxes (ndc)


"No one's noticed" <Mark.Kanim@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1175364552.809184.136260@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Mar 31, 1:04 pm, "DGDevin" <dgde...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


There's this representative democracy thing where the people elect
representatives who will spend the taxes and if the people don't like how
it's done they can vote out the reps and choose someone.

That's an adorable idea. And we tried it. It's morphed into something
unrecognizable.

Our representatives are debating a $140 billion war "emergency
spending bill" that includes $20 million for Mormon cricket
eradication? What? How'd that get in there?

Who's ready for version 2? By show of hands.

The interesting thing is how this debate has been turned on its head.

Until this administration, war and military spending (especially when we
know it will be needed in advance as opposed to some actual emergency that
just popped up) has always been included in the regular budget and spent via
the annual defense appropriations bill. This war is being financed off
budget, not subject to normal budget procedures or rules (like finding
offsets for new spending). Its not like they didn't know last year that
money would be needed this year. This has been going on for four years and
this massive spending is still not included in the budget or in the defense
appropriations bill.

Until this administration the annual supplemental emergency appropriations
bill existed exactly to fund things like Mormon cricket eradication, drought
relief, crop failure assistance, hurricane relief, earthquake relief, flood
relief, etc. A lot of it was always pork, but the ostensible purpose of
this annual bill is to fund actual emergency spending for unforseen
disasters in the United States.

Now we hear the right wing whining about spending that has always been the
ostensible SOLE PURPOSE of this bill being included in the bill where it
rightly belongs! They act as if the emergency supplemental appropriations
bill is supposed to be for war funding and that relief from domestic
disasters belongs somewhere else.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that this annual bill
exists to fund relief from domestic disasters and that war and military
spending belongs in the on-budget defense appropriations bill. It was the
Bush administration that corrupted the entire concept of the bill and they
are using it to spend hundreds of billions of dollars for inappropriate
purposes. This is the domestic disaster / pork bill!

Even if we leave that argument aside, I have to say its bizarre to complain
about 20 million to eradicate a plague of locusts and a hundred million to
fund rural schools when they're blowing yet another hundred BILLION on a
failed war we will never win.

OR


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