OpinionJournal – John Fund on the Trail
From the article:
Less well known is FDR’s decision to slash nondefense spending by over 20% between 1942 and 1944. Among the programs that were eliminated entirely were FDR’s own prized creations. By 1944, such pillars of the New Deal as the Civilian Conservation Corps, the National Youth Administration and the Work Projects Administration had been abolished. In 1939 those three programs had represented one-eighth of the federal budget. Roosevelt and the Congress of his day knew what to do in an emergency.
It’s a good point. With a war in Iraq and a huge hurricane recovery project underway here at home, why are we pushing through hugely over-inflated budgets, instead of making cutbacks?
With almost no debate and with precious few provisions for oversight, Congress has passed President Bush’s mammoth $62 billion request for emergency Katrina relief. House Speaker Denny Hastert says the final total will “probably [be] under the cost of the highway bill” that Congress passed last month with a pricetag of $286.4 billion.
[…]
Neither the White House nor Congress appears to be in any mood, for example, to revisit the highway bill’s 6,373 “earmarks,” or individual projects for members, worth $24.2 billion. Alaska’s Rep. Don Young, chairman of the House Transportation Committee, has bragged that the bill is “stuffed like a turkey” with goodies for his state. It includes $721 million for Alaska, including a $2.2 million “bridge to nowhere” connecting the town of Ketchikan (population 8,900) to an airport on Gravina Island (population 50). Another bridge, in Anchorage, has a $200 million price tag and is considered such a marginal project that even the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce opposes it.
“Stuffed like a turkey,” indeed! This sort of thing is just shameful.
