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Rahm Emanuel wants you!
| Sat, 11-15-2008 - 3:43pm |
From a 2006 interview on his mandatory civil service plan...
I think he had it at 18, but we were saying
| Sat, 11-15-2008 - 3:43pm |
From a 2006 interview on his mandatory civil service plan...
I think he had it at 18, but we were saying
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If I didn't make it clear... offensive war, unlike Afghanistan... we had cause. There was no cause for Iraq.
So if Obama planned to introduce troops on the level of Iraq to fight in another nation, yes... I would like that rule in place, this to make sure it is the right call. You can do it, but this is the price. Be awfully hard to doubt someone that paid such a price, right?
Full length fiction: http://llhaesa.org/ (pronounced la.hay.ess.sa)
Full length fiction: worlds undone
"You have no power over my body..." ~ Anne Hutchinson
You could do that - but it doesn't make fiscal sense to reduce your budget by 10% because you object to an expense that makes up less than 1%. Then there is the fact that not all of the spending is wasteful spending - are you willing to do without drug research for example?
Pork Barrel Spending Brings Home the Bacon
by Mengfei Chen
Volume 41, Issue 24 | Apr 14 2008
If supermarkets sold politics-themed piñatas, the bestseller would be shaped like a pork barrel. Pork-barrel spending is a favorite target of political pundits, online bloggers and even the very politicians who use the bacon, so to speak, to placate constituents and help their re-election campaigns. Entire organizations have the sole purpose of stirring up public outrage over projects like “the bridge to nowhere” and a $1-million appropriation for extraterrestrial contact.
We’re told that these fatty (or useless) projects are bankrupting our government and wasting our tax money. What we are almost never told is that pork-barrel spending is an insignificant portion of the federal budget. While instances of outrageous waste and abuse do happen, many pork-barrel projects are a worthy and wise use of public money.
Given the amount of attention given to pork, most people are under the impression that the dollar amount of pork spending is much bigger than it actually is. They mistakenly believe that getting rid of pork projects would have a significant impact on the ballooning budget deficit.
Yet even in the Citizens Against Government Waste’s annual “Pig Book,” the total cost of all pork projects in 2007 adds up to a mere $13.2 billion. This amounts to less than one percent of the annual federal budget. Eliminating every single pork project would barely make a dent in the budget crisis.
Furthermore, eliminating all pork projects would not necessarily be in the public interest. This is because not all “pork” is spent on peanut parades and teapot museums. In fact, most pork spending is money well spent. Examples include the millions of dollars funneled toward drug research, environmental protection and fixing other social problems.
A local example of beneficial “pork” is the Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force. Created with “pork” money, the task force sought to respond to a pressing local issue. In the years since its creation, the task force raised awareness in local immigrant communities, cultivated a network of informants and helped victims of trafficking.
Another example is the Orange County Water Reclamation Project. A water conservation/sustainability project in one of the most populous and driest areas in the country is hardly a waste of tax money, which is why you never read or hear about projects like these from the pork bashers.
These projects, along with hundreds of worthy programs across the nation, would never have been funded conventionally. This is because federal spending tends to be reactive and not proactive. As a group, Congress might fund FEMA for disaster relief, but they are unlikely to fund levies before the disaster happens. They might fund defense spending, but are less likely to recognize the value of wetland restoration.
In some ways, pork-barrel spending provides a way to get around the relatively unresponsive structure of the federal government. A congressman may think of a national alcohol rehabilitation program as unimportant, but he will often respond to the need for one in his district, where he can see the impact of abuse and face the consequences of doing nothing in the next election.
Pork spending can be used to fund innovative and forward-thinking projects that seek to improve the lives of the American people. It requires restraint on the part of individual legislators but hardly deserves the unsubtle and cynical treatment that it almost always receives.
How many years of pork barrel funding would be necessary to equal the 1 trillion spent on Iraq?
And the key word there is many. I just saw one estimate placing it at 20 billion... so that is 50 years.
That sorta puts that dumb war in perspective, eh?
Full length fiction: http://llhaesa.org/ (pronounced la.hay.ess.sa)
Full length fiction: worlds undone
"You have no power over my body..." ~ Anne Hutchinson
$13.2 billion in pork barrel spending in 2006. $2.57 trillion for the 2006 budget (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/interactives/budget06/budget06Agencies.html), divide the $13.2 billion and we get 0.5%. So the pork-barrel spending in 2006 was around 0.5% the total budget. Military spending proposed for in the budget in 2006...$419.3 billion (from 2006 budget link).
"The cost, of the Iraq war, to the American taxpayer is far beyond what Bush had originally said it would be. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the cost will hit the $1 trillion mark by the end of next year. The yearly cost has doubled since the 2003 appropriation of $74 billion - which the Bush administration expected to be the total cost of the war.
The BBC reports that some economists argue that the cost of the war will be far greater.
A study by the Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University and Linda Bilmes, a budget expert from Harvard, concludes the cost could be at least $3 trillion. The figure is so large because, Professor Stiglitz says, it includes costs that official estimates do not, such as the cost of the lifetime medical care for 65,000 injured American personnel."
so $74 billion doubled is $1,480,000,000,000 divided by 13 billion = 0.0087 - the percentage of pork barrel spending relative to the cost of the war in Iraq. Now, how many years would it take to recoup the cost of the war using pork barrel funds? Maybe I should use that as my warm up tomorrow for my pre-algebra students?
Yanno, that actually is a worthy thing to do... I would have loved it. Do you teach board debaters per chance?
;-)
That definitely puts the whole notion of pork barrel spending, as yakked on by the right, in perspective. Lessee... this war, this war you thought nothing of doing, hey great idea! This is what it costs us, yet ignore that, and rant on pork barrel spending.
Sigh.
Full length fiction: http://llhaesa.org/ (pronounced la.hay.ess.sa)
Full length fiction: worlds undone
"You have no power over my body..." ~ Anne Hutchinson
>Ironically, for most children they have been doing the same kinds of things for years - how many kindergarten students have NOT gone to sing at nursing homes? How many elementary students have NOT made cards for soldiers over seas? How many students of any age have NOT collected food for food banks? These are some of the 'service learning' projects that help our children see beyond their own needs and reach out to others. Sad that some parents protested this kind of program, but not unexpected.<
Since most children have been doing this kind of community service for years VOLUNTARILY, I find it sad that the schools now make it a requirement.
It's not the community service I find distasteful, it's the fact that it's mandatory.
No I don't teach board debaters - just 6th graders - although some of them are more mature than some of the board debaters here - LOL!
I think if people could put the cost into perspective they would be blown away - sadly even posting the figures here don't have a real impact for most because we just can't imagine how much it is. We hear trillion and billion and million all the time but we don't really realize just how much it is. :(
Might be good for everyone to read the book How Much is a Million and then realize that one million 1,000,000 is so much less than a trillion 1,000,000,000,000 and that is the figure we are throwing around like it is nothing.
If I didn't make it clear... offensive war, unlike Afghanistan... we had cause. There was no cause for Iraq.
That's just your opinion. My opinion is that it was a just and moral war.
Looks like you are of the opinion that pork barrel spending isn't such a bad thing after all.
I must say, I like tax cuts waaaay better than pork barrel spending. They spark the economy, let people keep more of their own money, and usually end up increasing government tax receipts because of the increase in economic activity, just as the Bush tax cuts did.
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