A friend sent me this link. It dramatically illustrates the rapidly increasing cost of the War on Terror in Iraq and Afghanistan. Currently, we’re running at around $593 billion.
That’s a lot, eh?
Until you consider that the Stimulus Shit Sandwich Act of 2009 as passed by the House yesterday cost upwards of $825 billion.
- $593 billion over seven years to keep our country safe, promote political stability in the middle east and maintain the ‘oil status quo’.
- $825 billion in 10 seconds last night to keep Democrats in power and pork going to their constituents.
The worst part of this is that the $825 billion is going to become the new baseline for future budgets approved by Congress for years to come. See this example from Hotair.com:
The Department of Education gets a whopping $66 billion in this bill. In 2001, the federal government spent $35 billion in total in the Department of Education, and by 2006 the Bush administration raised it to $85 billion, almost tripling the outlay. Now Congress wants to add $66 billion on top of what we’ve already budgeted for the DoE, a figure that almost doubles the entire 2001 DoE budget from just eight years ago.
This means the new baseline where all federal education funding will start in Congress is $151 billion. That’s roughly 4 and a half times the Department’s funding at the end of the Clinton Administration. From this baseline, Congress will be able to say each year, “we are being fiscally responsible by only increasing Education funding by 2%.”
Well yeah, you are…but considering where that baseline started from, that is still a hell of a lot of cash. And this same thing will happen in every facet of government that receives a chunk of that $825 billion.
Now say what you will about the need to spend more on education funding….but even if you’re for the obnoxiously massive increases, the haphazard way they are going about it is beyond the pale. Personally, I worked for two years on the Hill on Education issues and for two years at the U.S. Department of Education as a political appointee. Trust me on this….they will have NOOO idea how to spend this money efficiently and effectively. There is a reason we have an education, budget and appropriations committee that carefully reviews all funding and specifically directs where it’s going over the course of each fiscal year. It is to provide oversight. And considering how imperfect that system is, imagine what the results will be in respect to this Stimulus Shit Sandwich Act of 2009.
Frightening.