Ed Thompson Was Right

Repub-licrats? Demo-cans? What's the diff?

Hurricane Costs Send Budget Projections Deeper into the Red

More conservative thought..this, from my pals at the Heritage Foundation;

President Bush has pledged to do whatever it takes to rebuild the lives and communities devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

This pledge comes with a price tag.

To deliver this kind of aid, Congress and the President must set priorities and make sacrifices and trade-offs to pay for it. Offsetting the cost of rebuilding is all the more important because the rebuilding effort follows a 33 percent expansion of the federal government since 2001, a period that saw:

• The 2001 No Child Behind Act, the most expensive education bill in American history, which led to a 100 percent increase in education spending;
• The 2002 Farm Security and Rural Investment Act, the most expensive farm bill in American history;
• The 2003 Medicare Modernization Act, the most expensive Great Society expansion in history;
• A war in and the rebuilding of Iraq that, while justified, could cost between $300 and $600 billion, in total;
• International spending leap 94 percent;
• Housing and Commerce spending surge 86 percent;
• Community and regional development spending jump 71 percent;
• Health research spending increase 61 percent;
• Veterans’ spending increase 51 percent; and
• The number of annual pork projects leap from 6,000 to 14,000.

And the punchline (cue the applause);

Unless lawmakers make difficult decisions now, they will dump the largest debt in world history into the laps of the next generation

Yup, those of us who dedicated ourselves to the conservative cause on that July, 1980 evening, while watching the Republican National Convention in Detroit on a flickering Admiral black and white TV, cheering the arrival of Ronald Reagan, this is the results of our 25 years of labor;

A Republican House, a Republican U.S. Senate, a Republican White House, a Republican Judiciary.

Who among them will step-up and do what it takes to keep our country, our economy, our children from facing another round of Jimmy Carter-esque malaise?

Let's start here:

Redirecting their states’ earmarks to the Gulf Coast, where the money is
more needed ($20 billion annually, plus the $24 billion of earmarks in the recent highway bill);

Eliminating corporate welfare spending ($60 billion annually);

Attacking waste, fraud, and abuse, which have grown unchecked for the two decades following the 1984 Grace Commission report (over $100 billion annually);

Addressing the 40 percent of federal programs that, according to the government’s own assessments, fail to show any positive impact on their intended beneficiaries (untold billions annually);

Replacing the unaffordable Medicare drug entitlement with the Medicare drug discount card (as much as $2 trillion over the next 20 years); and

Most importantly, enacting a federal Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights capping the growth government at the inflation rate plus population growth. Such a cap would help lawmakers set priorities and make trade-offs and could save as much as $3 trillion to $4 trillion over the next decade.