Today is President Obama’s FY 2013 budget roll out day. This last budget was unanimously defeated by the Senate last year and we should expect a similar result this year. According to news reports, the $3.8 trillion budget will contain about $1.4 trillion in higher taxes. The House and Senate will take up a bloated highway bills. The Senate will take up a judicial nomination to | Read More »
Last week, John Boehner’s spokesman, Brendan Buck, falsely asserted that the highway bill is “completely paid for –without raising the gas tax,” and will not engender further bailouts. The reality is that this bill will impel an immediate $40 billion bailout from the general fund, while relying on phantom offsets to pay for it over 10 years. Moreover, these offsets will never pass and will | Read More »
Aside from defeating Obama, the most important goal of the 2012 elections is to win back the Senate. Or is it? On days like today we should begin to wonder if there really would be much of a difference when there are 51 senators with an R next to their name as opposed to just 47. In another terrible day on the Hill, Senate Republicans | Read More »
Throughout the week, Republicans have expressed their shock and dismay that we would have the unbridled temerity to oppose a highway bill. They want to know why we are suddenly opposed to such basic things as transportation bills, even ones that will leave us with a $70 billion budget shortfall. They are impugning our motives, charging us with opposing everything that emanates from leadership. Well, | Read More »
We’ve directed a lot of attention to the deficiencies of the House version of the highway bill (here and here). We must also work to defeat the Senate version, which is even worse. The 2-year $109 billion Senate bill (S.1813) offers no reform to mass transit and continues to mandate that states use 10% of their funding for wasteful “enhancement projects.” As bad as the | Read More »
Last week, several House committees favorably reported the $260 billion 5-year House GOP highway bill to the full body. This 846-page behemoth is now headed to a floor vote sometime next week. Simply put, conservatives oppose the House leadership’s highway bill (H.R. 7) because it continues the failed top-down federal approach to transportation spending, while precluding devolution to the states for at least another five | Read More »
Here we go again. Republicans talk incessantly about the need to cut the deficit, yet they are once again proposing a policy that will actually augment the deficit. On March 31, authorization for transportation spending, along with its accompanying revenue source – the federal gasoline tax – is set to expire. Republicans in the House and a bipartisan group in the Senate have introduced dueling | Read More »
We’ve seen this show before. Republicans propose grand ideas to cut spending and implement free-market reforms; they speak ebulliently about their new ideas, and …they summarily scuttle them and cave to the Democrats. Earlier this year, Republicans proposed a commendable plan to end the bipartisan pork fest of surface transportation spending. Instead of continuing the inexorable expansion of transportation spending, House Transportation Committee Chairman John | Read More »
One of the preferred methods liberals use to tax and spend is to create special “trust funds” for particular expenditures, with the intent of hiding the funds within the Treasury’s general fund. The system goes something like this: levy a tax that is supposedly earmarked for a specific expense and impounded in a trust fund (lock box); gradually purloin the fund by using it for | Read More »
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