-By Warner Todd Huston
There is no other aspect of Washington D.C. that upsets voters more than government spending surreptitiously added on to spending bills and this week Congress indulged its inner drunken sailor once again by adding a $10 billion bailout for teachers unions in the bill that is supposed to fund the war effort.
The teacher union bailout ups the $60 billion expenditure to a $70 billion tab and is causing even some Democrats to balk.
Republicans have demanded that the war funding bill be clean of any tacked on spending and have threatened to withhold support of the bill if the teachers union bailouts and other unrelated spending additions are kept.
Retiring Wisconsin Representative David Obey is insisting on the bailouts and pork spending but claims that he’s fighting the administration over finding budget cuts to offset the spending spree. Who ever believes that Congress intends to actually find such offsets is seriously deluded. I have some Enron stock to sell them if they are that out of touch with reality.
The bill includes $18 billion in energy loan guarantees, $500 million to hire new border patrol agents, along with the teacher union bailouts. Curiously, with all the wild-eyed spending, the Democrats stripped out the $200 million that was supposed to go to fund further building of the fence on our southern border.
So, it’s nothing for the fence but tall cash as a sop to unions. We can see where the Democrat’s priorities are, can’t we?
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDailyReview.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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