Meet the mother of all earmarks: $48 billion (UPDATED)
Leave it to Cleaver: Emanuel and his pals
If Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) gets his way, Christmas will come early to his congressional district. And judging by the size of the gift, it will last for a long, long time.
Cleaver, who is chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, is proposing to divert $48 billion of taxpayer funds to the Quality Day Campus, a not-for-profit something or other that would redistribute your money to poor people. Sounds fair, no?
Pressed for details about the plan, Cleaver’s office is quoted by the Southeast Missourian as explaining that the cash would be used for
[a] mass scale urban reclamation project for combating, reducing, reversing and/or eliminating poverty within under served communities by utilizing mass scale economic redevelopment to bring about stability and self reliance.
If that explanation strikes you as skimpy on the details, you can at least rest easy in the knowledge that once Congressman Cleaver picks your pocket for this project, he will leave you alone. Oh, wait—no he won’t. I forgot to mention the $48 bil covers “Phase One” of his vision for a richer inner city.
Is this man mad? There seems to be little question. But that’s only because members of Congress have been conditioned to view themselves as benefactors to their constituents. Remember, the late John Murtha saw nothing wrong with extracting $200 million from the national coffers to build an airport—named for him, no less—that has three commercial flights a day.
Of course, when it comes to acts of indebtedness to one’s congressional district, there is a yawning chasm between $200 million and $48 billion.
It is worth noting that this is not the first time Cleaver has promoted this absurd experiment in wealth redistribution. His previous efforts have blessedly failed, as almost certainly will this one. The real question that emerges is when American voters will say, “Enough!” When we will get on the case of our elected officials in Congress to do the job they were hired to do, which is make laws, not friends back home.
UPDATE: It has been brought to my attention that the Wall Street Journal blog Washington Wire reports Cleaver had been asked to help secure this earmark but never actually proposed it in Congress. The item appears on Cleaver's appropriations spreadsheet with no amount entered next to it. Mary Petrovic, a spokeswoman for Cleaver, has stated, "We did not propose it [the inner-city project], we do not promote it, and we did not submit it to the House Appropriations Committee.”
Petrovic went on to clarify that Cleaver did not specify which earmarks he actually supported because “the rules do not require us to do so.” Accurate though her statement might be, it would seem based on entries in Cleaver's spreadsheet that perhaps it's high time those rules were changed. The total of the items penciled in that do have dollar amounts—which includes half a billion dollars for a regional transit system upgrade for Jackson County—is well over $1 billion dollars. That's a lot of proposals for a member of a legislative body with more than 500 members. It would benefit us as a nation to place some constraints on what our elected lawmakers can promise their constituents back home—a measure that would ensure greater transparency at election time.
Read more at www.examiner.com
No comments:
Post a Comment