Flashback: Democrats Yearly Deficit Spending 6.5 Times Higher than Republicans. Democrats Pork Spending 50 Times Higher
An important reminder about the budget numbers from 2010.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0CUcnRPSeg]
CNS News reported:
When Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) gave her inaugural address as speaker of the House in 2007, she vowed there would be “no new deficit spending.” Since that day, the national debt has increased by $5 trillion, according to the U.S. Treasury Department.
“After years of historic deficits, this 110th Congress will commit itself to a higher standard: Pay as you go, no new deficit spending,” Pelosi said in her speech from the speaker’s podium. “Our new America will provide unlimited opportunity for future generations, not burden them with mountains of debt.”
Pelosi has served as speaker in the 110th and 111th Congresses.
So much for that promise.
Byron York of the Washington Examiner:
Press coverage of the budget frenzy on Capitol Hill has suggested that pork-barrel earmark spending is still a bipartisan problem, that after months of self-righteous rhetoric about fiscal discipline, Republicans and Democrats remain equal-opportunity earmarkers.It's not true. A new analysis by a group of federal-spending watchdogs shows a striking imbalance between the parties when it comes to earmark requests. Democrats remain raging spenders, while Republicans have made enormous strides in cleaning up their act. In the Senate, the GOP made only one-third as many earmark requests as Democrats for 2011, and in the House, Republicans have nearly given up earmarking altogether -- while Democrats roll on.
The watchdog groups -- Taxpayers for Common Sense, WashingtonWatch.com, and Taxpayers Against Earmarks -- counted total earmark requests in the 2011 budget. Those requests were made by lawmakers earlier this year, but Democratic leaders, afraid that their party's spending priorities might cost them at the polls, decided not to pass a budget before the Nov. 2 elections. This week, they distilled those earmark requests -- threw some out, combined others -- into the omnibus bill that was under consideration in the Senate until Majority Leader Harry Reid pulled it Thursday night. While that bill was loaded with spending, looking back at the original earmark requests tells us a lot about the spending inclinations of both parties.
In the 2011 House budget, the groups found that House Democrats requested 18,189 earmarks, which would cost the taxpayers a total of $51.7 billion, while House Republicans requested just 241 earmarks, for a total of $1 billion.
Where did those GOP earmark requests come from? Just four Republican lawmakers: South Carolina Rep. Henry Brown, who did not run for re-election this year; Louisiana Rep. Joseph Cao, who lost his bid for re-election; maverick Texas Rep. Ron Paul; and spending king Rep. Don Young of Alaska. The other Republican members of the House -- 174 of them -- requested a total of zero earmarks.
Talk to Republicans, and they'll say it would be nice if there were no earmark requests at all, but party leaders can't control everybody. "Brown's retiring, Cao's defeated, Paul is Paul and Young is Young," one GOP aide shrugs. Still, the bottom line is that the House GOP's nearly perfect renunciation of earmarks is striking. "For a voluntary moratorium, it was impressive that there were only four scofflaws," says Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense.
The Senate is a different story. But even though some Republicans are still seeking earmarks, Democrats are by far the bigger spenders. The watchdog groups found that Democrats requested 15,133 earmarks for 2011, for a total of $54.9 billion, while Republicans requested 5,352 earmarks, for a total of $22 billion.
If you look at the top 10 Senate earmarkers as measured by the total dollar value of earmarks requested, there are seven Democrats and three Republicans. (The leader of the pack is Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu, who requested $4.4 billion in earmarks.) The three Republicans are Sens. Roger Wicker, Sam Brownback and Thad Cochran. One of them, Brownback, is leaving the Senate, while the other two are from Mississippi, which is apparently earmark heaven.
Commentary:
Isn't it interesting that the only time you hear about "deficits" from the Democrats and the elite media is when they want to raise tyour taxes? Then the Democrats drop a 1.1 trillion dollar spending bill in the hopper near the end of a lame duck session and what do we hear? The ....chirp....chirp....chirp... of crickets in the silence.
As the Deficit Commission has rightly pointed out tax rates need to be lowered for most individuals and businesses because the higher the rate the less the compliance, the higher the rate the more wealth goes overseas, the higher the rate the fewer will take risk, the higher the rate the less small businesses can hire. The simple truth is that the wealthy and upper middle class can take money and park it in a tax free growth account and leave it there. They have the option of not moving their money thus it cannot be taxed. It is for these reasons it is economic growth that generates real revenue, not high tax rates.
You heard the rhetoric all over the elite media and from the Democrat leadership, "If we don't raise taxes on the "rich" the government will lose half a trillion dollars a year in revenue". That entire narrative is a canard for the following reasons.
There are very few wage earners who make $250,000 a year.
The way the tax code is set up the majority of people who pay the top marginal tax rate and not individuals at all, but are Sub-S small businesses with 5 - 200 employees.
The half a trillion dollar number is generated from a series of formula's that make up what is known as the "static Keynesian model". These models not only are not accurate, but usually are not even clos,e as they do not account for changes in behavior that result from people changing the rules. For example: the government taxes every cheese burger 100 dollars. Since America consumes a billion cheese burgers a year the government estimates that the tax revenue will be $100 billion dollars.
Of course this leaves out the obvious, who would buy a cheeseburger of the government taxed each one $100? So along comes a Republican who proposes to lower the tax to $50 per cheese burger; along comes the media and the Democrats to cry that the tax cuts are costing the government $50 billion a year! Quite dishonest isn't it?
Lowering tax rates resulted in increased revenue under Coolidge, Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton (second term tax cuts), and Bush II.