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Feb 11, 2004 One of the big political stinks just prior to the President’s State of the Union was the passage of the annual spending bill by Congress. The obstructionists found a few little things to squawk about to delay the bill’s passage so President Bush would not have any additional bragging points in his speech. The passage of the spending bill was a certainty because of the almost 12 billion dollars in “pork” that lawmakers were permitted to attach to secure their personal loyalties to the bill. One of the biggest critics of the bill was Sen. Dan Inouye (D), HI, and he ensured his absence during the vote to obstruct. When the final vote was taken up after the State of the Union, Sen. Inouye was right there to vote yes with all other supporters of the bill. Why would Dan be in support of a bill he was critical of? His support personally assured $485 million in “pork” (the largest amount of all demic-rats) for the State of Hawaii. Our hypocritical tax dollars at work! I have already beat the “pork barrel” to death. There is much spending inside the $329 billion dollar bill to commend it, especially a boost in funding for the FBI for its domestic protective measures against terrorism. I will not begrudge one penny to the forces whose responsibility it is to protect America. People yell about the pork all the time, yet it is always there. Until we can have a president with guts and a “line item veto” this aspect of the federal budgeting system will never change. Now, with the passage of this spending bill and the “massive deficits” that will result, comes an article citing a study that surely will cause some demic-rats to choke on their diatribes. “Economic signs appear strong” was an article I found only three days after the passage of the spending bill. The article was very toned down. The first paragraph told me the U.S. economy “probably expanded at a 5 percent annual rate” which “may fuel growth this year”. Look, I’m not much of an economist, but I think a 5 percent annual growth rate certainly will fuel additional growth. The FED still hasn’t raised interest rates. Those rates have been sitting at 46-year lows. Many economists are agreeing that the current economy is the strongest since 1984, when my personal hero of tax cuts, President Reagan was kicking demic-rat butt. “Tax cuts and low interest rates are bolstering demand” which is exactly what the President said they would do. Eventually the demand will begin producing jobs to keep up with the pace of the demands. “Productivity, at a two decade high in the third quarter [is]…keeping prices in check”. This is probably a down side, because even with very high productivity, job creation is stagnant. The big “BUT” was certainly in place because all the increased productivity only resulted in a creation of 278,000 jobs over the past 6-month period. This was not enough to put a dent in the so-called 3 million lost job figure the demic- rats keep pushing around as fact. I will just throw this out. Rush Limbaugh’s web site linked an article the other day that explains this 3 million-job deal . The demic-rats are not being completely honest because they do not take the job creation figures back to the year 2000. There has only been a collective loss of a little more than 300,000 jobs nationwide. Many jobs have been replaced by other jobs since the beginning of Bush’s presidency. I also found an article in the Career section of the Honolulu Advertiser last week that shows a nationwide projection of health services job creation at a little over 2.9 million through the year 2008. This is what President Bush has been tactfully trying to tell us. He is preparing to develop and implement retraining programs for all the jobs that are being eliminated in the technical and steel and textile fields. America will need almost 3 million trained health care professionals over the course of the next four years. You can readily see the need for retraining programs. Gee, my President is so smart! The American budget is alive, and well, and in deficit mode. There is nothing new in deficit spending. Our economy works better in deficit mode anyway. Not one politician gives a darn as long as they can take some pork home to keep their re-elect-ability intact. I’ll bet even Mr. John McCain has a piece of pork in that spending bill. Rampant hypocrisy has always accompanied budget policy. The President himself has succumbed to the curse of the spend-a-holics and the expanders of government we-are-to-help-you-ism. I sometimes wonder if Mr. Bush is hiding behind a tax cut policy just to fool me about what conservatism is. We really need someone who is truly against expansive government and is truly for fewer taxes. There is still a forceful redundancy in government departments and services. I still believe massive savings can be garnered by forcing a major restructuring of the American public education system. We need to cut waste at the top. We then need to work out way down, ensuring a competency at the top that is able to evaluate competency at the lower echelons. We need superintendents that are willing to follow through with certification tests for teachers and comprehension tests for students. Testing, certifying, streamlining and modernizing can be accomplished through the elimination of wasteful and redundant tiers of bureaucrats. That may sound too simplistic. It would be the right thing to do though. We have to eliminate the pressure that is exerted against lawmakers to make things easy for intrusive unions to secure and protect the positions of badly qualified teachers and education officials. Part of President Bush’s retraining initiative could probably be used to help retrain incompetent teachers back to a level of competency. Annual re- certification must become law. We must not allow complacency to continue to hinder quality public education. Tenure has only bred educational sloth. A smaller, more manageable and properly managed government is a helpful entity. The overblown bureaucratic mess of a government we have now? Well, you can finish that thought. ------------ About the Author: Independent, Conservative, Christian. Married 29 years with 5 children raised and one grandson being raised. 30 year Army Veteran and published poet with www.poetry.com since Y2K. Email Michael John McCrae: michael.mccrae@us.army.mil Comment on this column in the forum. Tell a friend about this site! ------------ |
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