Earmarks explosion: Republicans could set record with big spending on pork barrel projects

[Free Vulcan]

Republicans have long defined themselves as the party of fiscal restraint and limited government. But after just two years of complete control of the nation’s capital, that same party has presided over an explosion of the most corrupt, unfair, and swampy practice in congressional history: pork-barrel earmarks.

Citizens Against Government Waste’s 2018 Congressional Pig Book exposes 232 earmarks in fiscal year 2018, 42 percent more than FY 2017. The cost of earmarks exploded to $14.7 billion, a 116 percent increase from last year and nearly nine times more than the increase in discretionary spending from FY 2017 to 2018. The only other time the cost of earmarks has at least doubled was FY 1992 to 1993. Since FY 1991, our group has identified 110,861 earmarks costing $344.5 billion.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/07/18/pork-barrel-spending-explodes-under-republicans-column/792588002/

[GrouchoTex]

This really sucks.
When you only have a handful of Congressman and Senators willing to fight for budgetary reforms, what can we expect?

[XenaLee]

This really sucks.
When you only have a handful of Congressman and Senators willing to fight for budgetary reforms, what can we expect?

You can expect the same hurtle toward the economic collapse cliff we've been on.... just a bit slower hurtle under the RINO-ruled GOP.    And that scant few/handful of Conservatives have been successfully marginalized by the GOP enemy within.

[ABX]

It isn't liberalism when we do it.

[edpc]

! No longer available


I seem to remember someone suggesting bringing back earmarks would be a good thing.

[Bigun]

One of the major reasons I no longer call myself a Republican!

[INVAR]

One of the major reasons I no longer call myself a Republican!

Yup!

It isn't liberalism when we do it.

No, there are myriad and many explanations to justify liberal policies.  The main one being that they just rename it and call it Conservative, and ridicule anyone who points out the bullshit and changes them with being enemies of the state.

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates 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 greatest civilizations has been 200 years." - Alexander Fraser Tytler

[Fishrrman]

Groucho wrote:
"When you only have a handful of Congressman and Senators willing to fight for budgetary reforms, what can we expect?"

Well, you can expect things to keep going as they are going.

That's why I chuckle a bit when folks here state that they're fiscal conservatives and want a Republican party that behaves that way again.
It ain't gonna happen.

Fishrrman's credo (I know you've read it before):
Reality is what it is. It is not what we believe it to be.

As I've stated before:
Those who have the power to fix America's fiscal problems won't do it and never will (until they have no choice in the matter).
Those who want the problems fixed, don't have the power to do so.

The only time that such problems will be addressed, is when that moment comes when things have become so "broken" that the problems will HAVE TO BE addressed.
And by that time, the "solutions" will be draconian and perhaps almost totalitarian.

How many folks here recall that oil train up in Lac Megantic, Quebec that "ran away" a few years' back, and rolled downhill into town, wrecking and killing almost 50 people?

The nation's deficits and spending is like that train, running downhill with no one at the controls and no brakes at all.

What finally stopped it?
What happened afterwards?

Look at the Bolsheviks -- they took over back around 1918, and it still took them 70 years to bring the Soviet economy to the point beyond which it could not continue...

So it will go with our economic fortunes.
They may "get fixed" someday, but they will have to break completely beforehand.

That time is coming, but I don't believe it will arrive for decades yet, at least 30 years or more, perhaps 50.
Maybe longer.

Until then, pour yourself something refreshing, and remember Peggy Lee as she sang:
Is that all there is?
Is that all there is?
Well, if that's all there is
Let's keep on dancing
Let's break out the booze
And have a ball
If... that's all... there is

[dfwgator]

It isn't liberalism when we do it.

Not a dime's worth of difference.