Does congress really care about the deficit?
Does congress really cares about the deficit? I mean really? My guess is no. Congress loves to blame the war in Iraq for the deficit. According to the GAO, as of today, the war in Iraq has cost taxpayers $534B. Hell, that is definitely a big number. Are they on to something? Are they just good stewards of our funds looking out for you and me? Nope, they just hate Bush so that’s the problem in their eyes. Keep in find that Congress is fighting tooth and nail to approve a $300B bailout of irresponsible mortgage lenders and borrowers. What happened to the deficit concerns there huh?! Now the war does not help the deficit one single bit, but piling on billions more in bailouts is just plane dumb.
Most Americans oppose a mortgage bailout, both for borrowers and for lenders. They oppose bailouts for homeowners by a roughly 2-to-1 margin (53 percent to 29 percent).
Add to that the FY 2008 $17.2B in Congressional pork/waste and I can understand why Congress has an approval rating of only 18.5% today. Yup that’s 9.8% lower than the President’s (29.3%) that they seem to think is to blame for everything.
The Congressional Pig Book is CAGW’s annual compilation of the pork-barrel projects in the federal budget. The 2008 Pig Book identified 11,610 projects at a cost of $17.2 billion in the 12 Appropriations Acts for fiscal 2008. A “pork” project is a line-item in an appropriations bill that designates tax dollars for a specific purpose in circumvention of established budgetary procedures.
Can we force every one of them to have to run for reelection this Nov? God I wish we could…………
