Senator against government waste
I have Pat Toomey and the Club For Growth to thank for this one.
Earlier this month one of my favorite Senators, Oklahoma’s Tom Coburn, put out a report on the worst examples of government waste in 2008. (I suppose one could argue this report by one who’s on the public payroll and his publicly-funded staff would be an example of wasting money and time compiling such nonsense, but it is a small price to pay.)
Really, the first paragraph in the executive summary says it all:
Politicians in Washington outdid themselves in 2008, wasting taxpayer money in ways and amounts once thought unimaginable – all without blushing. So outrageous was the spending, an outside observer would be forced to think that not only do Americans love to pay taxes, but that the federal budget was in a state of perpetual surplus. This report is an attempt to pull back the curtain on 65 examples of wasteful Washington spending worth more than $1.3 billion, and by doing so, provide a mechanism to hold Congress accountable for fiscal responsibility. It is time for Washington to stop recklessly spending other peoples’ money and burdening future generations with insurmountable national debt.
I’ll have to admit that when we’re looking at a budget deficit which could be 1,000 times the amount of waste Senator Coburn found the effort is fairly symbolic at best. But it serves as a talisman to point out that we really have stuck our federal (and state) governments into many places they don’t belong, like my other example.
As we found out on Friday, the proposed $15 billion bailout to the Big Three (read: United Auto Workers) died for lack of cloture in the Senate. In the same e-mail the Club For Growth handily put in the House and Senate votes on the issue. While it’s not unexpected that the local Maryland and Delaware delegations basically split along party lines, it’s more telling that neither of the two local participants in the 110th Congress who won’t return failed to vote; neither Biden or Gilchrest recorded a vote. Particularly in the Senate, where 13 Senators did not vote and the measure failed by eight, the timing of the lame duck session made a difference – most of the non-voters were leaving the Senate after this term.
In any case, for the moment American taxpayers have dodged one expensive bullet – unfortunately the Democrats are rolling into Washington with an arsenal of bright ideas to spend your money on.
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