As the national debt clock ticked past the ignominious $13 trillion mark overnight, Congress pressed to pass a host of supplemental spending bills to, among other things, fund the continuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, ramp up security on the U.S.-Mexico border and prevent teacher layoffs.
Taken together, the Democratic-led U.S. Congress is trying to find a way to pass about $300 billion more in unfunded spending before Memorial Day – a spending spree that rivals anything drunken sailors have been accused of.
……Lawmakers also have loaded up a separate bill that originally was intended to extend expired tax breaks and provide expanded unemployment benefits through the end of the year. The bill has grown into a nearly $200 billion grab bag of unfinished business that lawmakers hope to complete before Memorial Day.
The bill includes $1 billion for summer jobs programs, $1.5 billion in aid to farmers who had crops damaged by natural disasters and $4.6 billion to settle two long-running lawsuits against the government, one by black farmers claiming discrimination and one by American Indians over the government’s management of their land.
In all, the bill would add $134 billion to the federal budget deficit, drawing opposition from Republicans and some Democrats. House leaders said Tuesday they were determined to pass the bill this week to avoid allowing jobless benefits to expire for thousands of people.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/05/26/despite-soaring-national-debt-congress-goes-spending-spree/
Funding for the necessary things like the war and border security, should have been priority a long time ago. The problem with this is they still refuse to cut back on all of the wasteful earmarks and pork barrel projects that got us into a $13 trillion debt.
Citizens Against Government Waste (http://www.cagw.org/) published a list of over 9,000 egregious examples for 2010. (so far)
This is the kind of shit they’re wasting OUR money on:
•$465,000,000 for the alternate engine for the Joint Strike Fighter;
•$5,000,000 for the Presidio Heritage Center in California;
•$1,000,000 for Portsmouth Music Hall in New Hampshire;
•$400,000 for the USA Swimming Foundation in New Jersey;
•$300,000 for Carnegie Hall in New York City;
•$250,000 for the Monroe County Farmer’s Market in Kentucky;
•$200,000 for the Washington National Opera in the District of Columbia; and
•$206,000 for wool research in Montana, Texas, and Wyoming.
And of course, the ObamaCare bill, which will exceed the $940 billion estimate, by a long shot.
http://www.cagw.org/newsroom/releases/2010/earmark-spending-165.html
The scumbags in D.C. care little about fiscal responsibility or the anger of American taxpayers. It’s up to us to do our own “Repeal and Replace” of Senators and Representatives in November.