Posted on 01/12/2015 1:13:43 PM PST by reaganaut1
Roughly one-sixth of the federal budget goes for nothing that’s a matter of national concern, but for grants to state and local governments. Those grants fund a vast array of programs and projects, such as:
$65 million so New York and New Jersey can promote themselves as “good places to do business.”
$3.9 million for the airport in St. Cloud, MN, which has no daily commuter flights.
$532,000 to beautify one block on Main Street in Rossville, KS (pop. 1,150).
As Senator Everett Dirksen used to say, “A million here, a million there and pretty soon we’re talking real money.” Since Dirksen’s day, federal giveaways for state/local “needs” has grown tremendously.
The mushrooming cost of these constitutionally illegitimate outlays is the subject of Saving Congress from Itself by James L. Buckley, just published by Encounter. Buckley observes that the U.S. “is spending itself into bankruptcy and its legislative branch appears incapable of focusing on critical problems long enough to resolve them.” A large portion of that spending should never have been permitted because giving money to state and local governments is not among the powers granted to Congress.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeleef/2015/01/12/buckleys-modest-proposal-would-erase-18-percent-of-the-federal-budget/
I thought he said, "a billion" here, there.
We need a CEO for president.
This is what I would say qualifies as an actual “dream act”. That is, it’ll never get past the dream phase. The bastards don’t work for us anymore and they know there isn’t a damned thing we will do about it.
Back in his time, he was correct in using million. Nowadays, using billion would be more appropriate.
“A large portion of that spending should never have been permitted because giving money to state and local governments is not among the powers granted to Congress.”
Neither is taking money from one person and giving it to another, yet they do it to the tune of trillions of dollars every year.
There’s some cherry picking on the examples of “wasteful spending”, but a lot of it is basic stuff that the feds use as a lever against state governments: highway funds, education, healthcare. A lot of this money is wasteful as well, as it gets spent on things that actually are unwanted by the states (e.g. Michelle Obama’s school lunch plan), but a lot of it is (due to law at both levels) part of policy implementation. The states couldn’t even come close to replacing that money. This will have to be fixed piecemeal.
If states weren’t being bribed with their own money they might start to reassert some of those 10th amendment rights. Fedscum would never allow that to happen.
The problem is that its redistribution.
Poor states are able to use fed funds to redistribute rich state cash to themselves.
One reason the Solid South stayed so solid even when the Rat party had already become the Rainbow Gang.
He said billion.
He did.
We had our chance in 2012 to vote for Romney.
Crazy idea. All federal income revenue should be sent to the respective states that these funds were derived from. Let the states write the checks to the fed-gov. Let the rebellion begin.
The figure Dirksen was talking about was $7 billion with a B. It was early in the Federal mushrooming process, but not that early.
At the time, I didn't realize he was right.
I always thought it was million but wikiquotes says it was billion but his comments weren’t reported accurately.
It was billion.
One id like to see is to stop all interest payments to the Federal reserve. They create “dollars” out of thin air, and loan them to the US government. It should either be nationalized, or walked away from.
With one fell swoop, the US Govt could do what the fed does for free.
There is no need to pay a private bank to do what the constitution says the government should do for itself.
“We had our chance in 2012 to vote for Romney.”
And we would have an abortion advocate, an open borders amnesty guy, the architect of Obamacare, a gay marriage man, a guy who wants to ban assault rifles, a global warming believer, an a bald faced internationalist in the hands of the bankers.
If other words, we would have a white Obama, without the jive talk and with a few less open Marxists in appointed positions.
But very little else different. Other than emotional window dressing, he would have been very similar to Obama.
The Scottish Jurist and Historian Sir Alexander Fraser Tytler published a collection of lectures in 1801. He advanced a theory of democracy based on historical observation:
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can exist only until voters discover that they can vote themselves largesses from the public treasury. From that time on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.
“The average age of the world’s great civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependency; from dependency back again to bondage.”
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