The chickens have come home to roost:
A vow to vote down their own earmarks
The port city of Pascagoula on Mississippi's Gulf Coast wants to build a beach promenade, with new benches, lush landscaping and a lighted pathway for joggers, cyclists and dog walkers.
So the municipality of 24,000 hired a pair of Washington lobbyists. The city shelled out $40,000 a year, according to public records, to retain Jeffrey Brooks and Wayne Weidie. They are former top aides to Gulf Coast congressmen and frequent donors to Mississippi's elected officials.
The lobbyists parlayed their connections and know-how to secure a $900,000 earmark for the beach promenade development in the $1.2 trillion spending bill introduced this week in the Senate. The earmark was one of hundreds sponsored by Mississippi's two Republican senators, Thad Cochran and Roger Wicker.
While Cochran is among Capitol Hill's unabashed spending barons, the bill has reignited the debate over earmarks - federal funding for pet projects - in part because of the more delicate situation Wicker faces: After an election in which voters seemed to demand fiscal belt tightening, he and dozens of other senators from both parties are now decrying the very earmarks they sponsored earlier in the year. Wicker, like many other GOP senators with earmarks in the bill, says he will vote against it.
What a perfect encapsulation of everything that's wrong with the GOP's approach to fiscal policy. First, they pretend that deficits are entirely a function of spending -- that revenue has nothing to do with it. Then, even though they refuse to acknowledge the revenue side of the equation, the only things they are willing to talk about on the spending side are utterly inconsequential components of the budget like earmarks.
So you end up with a scenario where Republicans make a big stink about opposing a $1.2 trillion bill because it includes $8 billion in earmarks that they originally requested. How much impact will that have on spending? Well, if they get their way, they'll reduce the cost of the $1.2 trillion bill to....$1.2 trillion. It's less than a drop in the bucket.
And while they decry these earmarks that they requested, they demand huge tax cuts for the super-wealthy. Check this statistic out: the $8 billion in earmarks requested by the GOP comes from 6,600 projects. Meanwhile, the difference between the estate tax deal that Republicans are demanding and the one preferred by House Democrats? $10 billion. And it would benefit 6,600 families. So Republicans would want to kill 6,600 projects costing $8 billion, projects that would benefit a wide swath of their constituents -- and they want to spend the money they save on 6,600 wealthy families. And they want to throw in another $2 billion, just to make sure that nobody thinks they actually are serious about fiscal sanity.
Finally, the next time Republicans make a big stink about fiscal discipline, consider these facts: by the end of the Clinton presidency, federal tax revenue was 20.6% of GDP and federal spending was 18.6% of GDP. By the end of the Bush presidency, federal tax revenue was 17.5% of GDP and and federal spending was 20.7% of GDP. That's a 3.1% drop in tax revenue as a share of GDP and a 2.1% jump in spending as a share of GDP. So about three-fifths of the fiscal problem is that taxes are too low.
And what accounts for the jump in spending? The biggest piece of the puzzle is our costly war policy. In 2000, we spent 3% of GDP on defense. In 2008, that soared to 4.2% -- meaning that more than half of the total increase in spending during the Bush years came from defense spending. And what have we gotten from that defense spending? Ten years of war and a mountain of debt.