In a speech about his budget balancing plan Rand Paul says “People in official Washington think this a pretty bold, maybe overly bold, proposition. But it only cuts about a third of the annual deficit.” He’s right, people in Washington do think it’s bold, and that’s a big problem. They don’t think inflating the budget deficit by billions of dollars is bold at all, but deflating it to them would be a nightmare. Why are they so easy to add to the deficit but so restrained in tackling it?
Each senator and representative is hesitant to cut the budget because each has put his or her own special interest giveaways in the budget. If a congressman starts cutting someone else’s pet projects, he may find that they cut his in the next budget. There is a bit of game theory involved here for all you economics buffs. As a congressman you can cut others’ spending and risk your own, or keep your own and allow the others’. There is no equilibrium where you get to cut someone else’s spending and keep your own, that’s not how the back scratching works in Washington.
The EPA is poised to reward the biggest Democratic special interest group of all, the green industrial complex, with all the misallocated capital and spending it can handle. By unilaterally regulating carbon dioxide emissions, something it doesn’t have any authority to do, the EPA will be rewarding a major contributor to Democrats across the country. Industries will rush to buy solar panels and wind turbines even if this isn’t the best use of their capital. In return for the Obama administration’s blunt force administrative decrees at the EPA, the green industrial complex will surely go on rewarding him with campaign donations.
It seems that every spending bill in Washington is aimed at sating the desire of one interest group or another. Obamacare was the perfect example of such nonsense. The unconstitutional individual mandate was a special interest giveaway to insurance companies to buy their support. No it has been ruled an unconstitutional breach of congressional power, and rightfully so.
President Obama’s key legislative victory is already being dismantled with the Senate’s passage of a repeal of the 1099 amendment. The president’s signature piece of legislation will go down in history as one of the most ill-thought-out pieces of partisan legislation in history. Whether its repeal comes in pieces or altogether, Obamacare will not stand.
Latest posts by Richard C. Young (see all)
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