The Color of Money
On Capitol Hill, forget saving for a rainy day -- It's spend, spend, spend!
Flake and Coburn have been scolding earmark-happy lawmakers, too--not that they have much to show for their efforts. The emergency spending bill--passed last week in the Senate, 77 to 21--to finance the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Gulf Coast hurricane recovery proved to be yet another boondoggle. Senators added $17 billion more in spending. Among the pet projects: $700 million to move a railroad track, destroyed by Katrina and since rebuilt; $11 million for erosion control in Sacramento, Calif.; and $6 million to help Hawaiian sugar companies recoup losses from rain damage. "Did we win the battles? No," Coburn says, but he's optimistic that talking about earmarks will raise attention. "We're changing the dynamic. The American public is awake on this and wants to hold us accountable."
Maybe, but the number of earmarks more than tripled between 1994 and 2004, and their price shot up to $53 billion, according to the Congressional Research Service. "The appropriators have reached a level of disdain for others in Congress," says Stuart Butler, a domestic policy expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "It's like it's their money."
Veto threats. Now the spending bill is headed for tough negotiations with the House, where the Republican leadership has drawn a line in the sand, saying it won't consider any dollar not related to the projects originally in the bill and an extra $2.3 billion for flu preparations that the president has approved. Last week, Bush made his most direct veto threat yet on the spending bill. "If he doesn't carry through, you might as well just throw the gates wide open to the Treasury," Flake says. "We'll be in the minority in November."
For now, Republicans have some good news to crow about. Tax receipts are on the rise, leading the Treasury and outside economists to slash their deficit estimates this year to around the same level--$320 billion--as last year. But next year will be the fifth consecutive year in the red, and while Bush has said he would trim deficits by 2009, the mounting costs of the war in Iraq paint a grim fiscal picture. The tax cuts, which may come to a vote as early as this week, would expire on the next president's watch, just a few years before the baby boomers retire. "This is the most favorable fiscal decade we'll ever enjoy again in this country," Furman says. "Now is not the time for complacency."
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