Silly Season
Truly, pleading for line-item veto power is the last refuge of conservative scoundrels. Bush hasn't bothered to veto anything at all so he hardly seems in need of additional veto powers. On top of that, it's simply a myth -- a giant one -- that "pork" projects are an important cause of "big government." Overwhelmingly, money is getting spent on big popular programs like Social Security and the Navy.
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J. McCutchen "JmacSF"
San Francisco. CA
This ain't silly. This is excellent!
Now imagine if you will that you are in the twilight zone........and you turn on your TV in Schenectady and there's Hillary Clinton
June 27, 2006 2:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
I have to agree; A President who has cast no vetos at all this late in his second term has no grounds at all to ask for a line item veto. Not that it's a bad idea, but Bush isn't the one to be asking for it.
An enforced single subject rule would be better, though.
June 27, 2006 2:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
The single subject rule is generally a good idea, but one problem is that it might make it harder to get certain types of trades/deals. For example, you might imagine a deal where one side agrees to increase funding for the Border Patrol, if the other side agrees to increase the annual quota of immigrant visas. Two separate executive departments are involved, and it's mixing budget with regulation, so it's probably not strictly a single subject. They could pass two bills side by side, but then each side is risking that their half will get vetoed while the other half remains, so a higher level of trust is required.
An alternative would be to make the "pork" process more transparent. Openly state that each rep gets (say) $10M to allocate to anything not outright illegal, and then post their choices prominently. Since it can be pinned direct on one rep, it would encourage spending it on something not too foolish at least by their district's standards. All the rest of the budget is required to be in form of large blocks to federal departments or agencies.
June 27, 2006 5:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
"it's simply a myth -- a giant one -- that "pork" projects are an important cause of "big government.""
No, no, no, Matt, you don't get it again.
"Pork" is THE main point of the state. It's bribery in reverse - bribing the constituents to keep you in office.
You spend money on Social Security to bribe the riff-raff constituents. You spend money on the Navy because that goes to the big corporations who are your PRIMARY constituents. One votes for you, the other pads your bank accounts. The "pork" is for both - on the one hand, to show you "care" about your state, on the other hand, to bribe some corporation or other special interest group to keep the campaign funds coming.
Get with the program. Both pork and major line items are necessary in any so-called "democracy".
Why would Bush veto anything? He doesn't give a damn what he says on national TV, why would he care enough to veto some pork? He might veto AIDS research, or he might veto some EFFECTIVE government program (if there ever was one), but he'll never veto pork OR major line items. It ain't his money and his cronies are the recipients.
June 28, 2006 3:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
J. McCutchen "JmacSF"
San Francisco. CA
June 28, 2006 7:08 AM | Reply | Permalink
'The "pork" is for both - on the one hand, to show you "care" about your state, on the other hand, to bribe some corporation or other special interest group to keep the campaign funds coming.
'
I agree with that aspect of what you're saying. Pork acts as cover for larger corruption and incompetence. You can be forgiven for supporting a catastrophic tax cut if you bring 200 jobs to the district. I disagree with the part about the larger, nationwide, line items being bribery for the riff-raff, though. You might as well say that good governance is a form of bribery for the riff-raff.
Njorl
June 28, 2006 11:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
You might say that if you actually thought such governance was *good*. That is in fact what "progressive" taxation and income redistribution are all about: Take a lot of money from as few people as possible, and use it to buy the votes of as many people as possible, so you'll have the power to order people around.
June 28, 2006 2:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
The line item veto is more selective in its interference with spending, so it stands to reason that it might be of particular value for a president who, for whatever reasons, has not exercised the general veto power previously.
June 28, 2006 7:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
Depends on whether the actual results of the "governance" ARE good.
As an anarchist, you know my response to that concept.
The fact of the matter is that politicians spend the taxpayer's money in ways that 1) get them re-elected; 2) make their personal bank accounts bigger one way or another (their own concealed or overt investments or via bribes); 3) allow them to accumulate more power in other ways.
Almost NO politician votes for to spend the taxpayers money out of some sense of "this is correct" or "this will work" to bring benefits to the general population. There may be a few with certain ideological biases that might think that way, but in almost all cases whenever such decisions conflict with the first three motivations above, those decisions will be overridden in a heartbeat.
Congress just voted down an increase in the minimum wage while voting themselves a raise.
Doesn't get more obvious than that - regardless of one's views on whether the minimum wage is a good concept or not (I happen to agree with the Austrian School that it isn't - but since we aren't under a "free market" in this country, the opinion is mostly irrelevant.)
June 28, 2006 10:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
So any democratically elected government with the power to tax and spend is merely a system of bribery? Obviously, the only moral government then is autocratic totalitarianism. Only when the government is completely free from the pressure of the citizenry can they be expected to act in a non-corrupt manner. Is that what you think?
Njorl
June 29, 2006 7:05 AM | Reply | Permalink
"So any democratically elected government with the power to tax and spend is merely a system of bribery?"
So, you're saying that only autocratic totalitarianisms will refrain from looting the minority in order to buy the majority's votes?
Well, you may be right about that; The only real virtue of democracy, after all, is that it's better from a utilitarian standpoint that the majority oppress the minority, than the other way around. Just not oppressing people, period, doesn't seem to be an option; Once you've got a government with the power to oppress, it's going to use that power on somebody.
Maybe it is better that the few be the victims, and the many be the victimizers. But let's not pretend that it's somehow noble of politicians to be the middleman in this transaction.
June 29, 2006 3:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
"The only real virtue of democracy, after all, is that it's better from a utilitarian standpoint ..."
Had you stopped there, you would have had a point. While some may believe in government for aesthetic reasons (see Matt's monarchy post), I only enjoy it for its utilitarian value. The idea that the wealthy are oppressed is lunacy. They are quite free to give up their wealth to escape such a terrible plight.
Njorl
June 29, 2006 8:18 PM | Reply | Permalink