Congress Punts: Public Loses

Another winter has come in Washington and brought with it another pork-laden omnibus spending bill. That's right. Thanks to Congress's continued inability to do its job, taxpayers are once again left holding the bag as billions of our hard-earned dollars are wasted.

Countless others have authored columns detailing some of the most egregious of the thousands of pork barrel projects included in the spending bill passed this week. So instead of joining the chorus bemoaning the inclusion of $1 million for the World Birding Center in Texas, $100,000 for a swimming pool in Kansas, or $2 million to buy back the presidential yacht, U.S.S. Sequoia (which the government sold in 1978 for $250,000), let's turn our attention to the larger structural issue.

Congress once again utterly failed to successfully discharge one of its most fundamental duties: writing and approving a federal budget.

Under Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution, "No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury" unless and until it is appropriated by Congress. Since the founding of the Republic, Congress has employed a number of processes for deciding how much to spend and what to spend it on. The current system was first put in place in 1974.

As the first step under this system, Congress is supposed to pass a "budget resolution." This resolution is not law, and it's usually ignored. But it's supposed to serve as the nation's budget blueprint by dividing spending into major categories and setting priorities. This year Congress didn't have to go to the trouble of ignoring the budget resolution. They didn't even bother to pass one.

At the same time, Congress's appropriators go to work. Starting from the President's budget request and supposedly working within the confines of the budget resolution, subcommittees of the House Appropriations Committee hold hearings and undertake the painstaking process of writing 13 bills that list, line by line, every item on which the federal government can spend money during the coming year.

If things go according to plan, the House and Senate will both finish their work on these 13 bills, reconcile any differences, and send the final versions to the President for his signature before the beginning of the fiscal year on October 1. During their deliberations, the House and Senate are supposed to carefully consider the provisions of each bill and decide which items to fund and not to fund. Certainly, each Member of Congress ought to have a chance to review these 13 bills and consider their impact.

However, things almost never go according to plan. This year, Congress only passed four of the 13 appropriations bills prior to the October deadline. Last year, it did only slightly better. No one can remember the last time ¯ if ever ¯ that Congress passed all 13 bills on time.

Instead, in a lame attempt to get its work done ¯ better late than never, they might say ¯ Congress often resorts to "omnibus" appropriations bills, wherein the world's greatest deliberative body lumps together all of the spending bills that they couldn't pass, throws in a hefty serving of pork in order to secure enough votes for passage, and sends the behemoth on to the President.

This year, Congress resorted to an omnibus for the third year in a row. And few, if any, Members read the entire bill that will ultimately fund the federal government this year.

Some say that the budget process is just too difficult to complete in nine months. Hogwash.

If any other worker failed, year after year after year, to get his work done on time, he would be fired. Not so for our 535 elected representatives. If the process is broken, Congress ought to fix it. Otherwise, it's time for the whiners in Congress to stop complaining and start working.

The power of the purse ¯ raising revenue and controlling government spending ¯ are Congress's most critical functions. Each year that Congress abdicates its constitutionally mandated fiscal responsibility is one more in which spending will grow unchecked, wasteful programs will continue without oversight and tax dollars will go to waste. That means more debt for our grandchildren and a further drag on U.S. economic growth.

America is the land of prosperity. But Congress is making it harder and harder to prosper, and that's something that ought to worry us all. If it worries us more, maybe it will worry our elected representatives more, too.

Marshall Manson is Senior Vice President for Public Affairs at the Center for Individual Freedom (www.cfif.org). Contact him at mmanson@cfif.org.

Note -- The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, and/or philosophy of GOPUSA.

" ...that's something that ought to worry us all. If it worries us more, maybe it will worry our elected representatives more, too."

It won't worry them a bit unless the public, spurred on by groups of bloggers and other concerned citizens take it on to worry them. If we all signed petitions, sent letters, called, etc. demanding they have to read every line of a bill before voting. After all we didn't elect their aides and interns to represent us. If we demanded the pork be taken out and voted on a "piggy" bill by itself; and every vote by published for their constitutes to see and respond to we might not spend so much for so few.

Without some form of a gold standard, it's hard to avoid transitioning to fascism or a hard oligarchy. The government today no longer needs to tax. They can just pay bills with newly "minted" money. And they do.

And because of that, the advantge is to those most close to the one well of money. That advantage is a force -- a directional force like gravity, inescapable it draws all power to it.

Gold is distributable, and mines are distributed. Gold can be hidden and hoared, smuggled. It breaks through tyranny because of that. Fiat money like we have is centralizing -- the central power can overwhelm all attempts to smuggle, to hoard. And it does, it has, is now so doing.

The Constitution forces centralized money -- otherwise there could be multiple fiat currencies. The Constitution's Framers, most of them, thought that and favored that centralization to AVOID coin clipping, debased coin currencies. It was merely a centralization of measure. One set of weights!

They were thinking COINS. They knew paper. The CONSTITUTION says "coin" money. Our "RULING CLASS" now takes that to mean just a verb, with no sense of it being the noun --a coin. So that our money can be paper. The Founder's wanted the Federal Money to be coin!

Coins are not centralized. A "dollar" -- that's a old Spanish measure of WEIGHT of gold -- is a dollar of gold, no matter how quickly the Congress can pass bills spending money -- in a gold coin system they'd have to beg us for gold.

Today -- not. They take our wealth at will by whimsy of the printing press and CPU's execution of programmed EFT, in oer the network. We have no recourse. Our individual monies and stores are naked - raped and abused.

The problem with the gold standard is that it puts control of the money supply in the hands of those who control the mines. Although gold is less manipulable than fiat currency, it is not immune to manipulation. If a country that uses gold as currency has an ample supply of mines available, its government can manipulate the currency. And if it doesn't have minimg capacity, other governments that do have such capacity will be able to manipulate it.

Although there are certainly advantages to the gold standard, there are also some severe drawbacks. Perhaps the most severe is that without fiat currency, it's basically impossible for banks to safely offer non-callable loans. If someone deposits 10,000oz of gold into the bank which then lends 7,500oz of it to someone else who buys a house on a ten-year mortgage, the bank may be confident that it will get the 7,500oz of gold back eventually, plus interest, but what can if offer if its depositor wants their money tomorrow? If there are runs on banks, this may cause gold to become briefly very valuable. Although such a market bubble may be short-lived, it may be devasting to those forced to sell goods for gold during it.

Regional non-federal banks and bank-like entities could print paper bills against a reserve. Fractional banking, distributed supply etc.

What could be regulated by fraction is the amount of real gold that could be drawn from one bank to another in one period of time -- that would ameliorate the accumulation of gold in the centrals.

No matter form of money you make you still can not avoid the Jubilee, but you can help prevent monetary-initiated fascisim and despotic oligarchy.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.