As you’ve likely heard already, the Republican Party in Congress has joined forces with the Democratic Party to make sure that no government program, no matter how pointless, does not have to suffer the indignity of even the tiniest spending cut.
James Bovard performs a post mortem on the budget “debate” forUSA Today. Just a partial list of outrages listed by Bovard include:
The bill fails to block President Obama from delivering up to $3 billion to the United Nations Green Climate Fund, a partial product of the Paris climate summit. Republicans initially planned to block such funding unless the Senate was permitted to vote on the U. N. climate treaty. But since the omnibus bill failed to prohibit such payments, Obama will soon deliver $500 million in U. S. tax money to the fund – despite the legendary record of U. N. programs for corruption worse than Chicago. The bill fails to block perhaps the Environmental Protection Agency’s greatest land grab – its ‘waters of the United States’ decree that seizes federal jurisdiction over 20 million acres that are sometimes wet. The EPA’s wetland crackdowns have been trounced by numerous judges. Republicans faltered even though theGovernment Accountability Office reported Monday that EPA had engaged in illegal ‘covert propaganda’ to promote this policy. It provides more than $3.7 billion for economic and military aid to Afghanistan, though an Agency for International Development study recently warned that some projects ‘actually had the perverse effect of increasing support for the Taliban.’ Afghan relief continues to be a hopeless mess; the AID inspector general reported last week that the agency’s highly touted new monitoring system was used for less than 1% of grants and contracts.
This post was published at Ludwig von Mises Institute on DECEMBER 18, 2015.
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