Fiscal Trickery

There were many reasons that the "highway bill" passed last week in Congress was awarded a big fat "F" in my Congressional Report Card over the weekend. But in one of those classic "if I knew then what I know now" instances, an "F" is looking pretty darn generous.

Carl Hulse reports in the New York Times on Thursday that the White House requested a bit of fuzzy math (there's a blast from the past) be performed on the highway bill, which the president had threatened to veto if it weighed in at more than $284 billion. Of course even officially the behemoth passed in the House and Senate is slated to cost $286.4 billion ... but apparently $2.4 billion over the line set by the White House is just fine.

Ah, but that $2.4 billion - well that was only the beginning. Another $8.5 billion was added to the bill at the last minute, using a tricky budget tool known as rescission. Ultimately, the White House says, that $8.5 billion will have to be remitted to the Treasury before the highway bill expires at the end of September 2009, so it doesn't have to be added to the total tally.

Anybody up for an $8.5 billion bet that the treasury never sees that money again? Of course I don't have $8.5 billion, but hey, we'll use federal spending rules.

The best part about this "legislative legerdemain" (Hulse's term, but a good one) is that there's no question about it. The White House and Congressional officials freely admit it. A spokesman for the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee, Bill Holbrook, goes on the record to say "The White House requested the rescission to keep the authorization at $286.4 billion over the 2004-2009 period, and the Senate agreed to it because it will not change how much we anticipate states will spend on highways and bridges."

Right, they'll spend their $286.4 billion, plus that nice little $8.5 billion star stuck on the top of the pork-decorated Christmas tree. William Hoagland, who Hulse calls "a budgetary expert and policy adviser to the Senate majority leader" went the extra mile, saying of the rescission "This is a device that is intended to appear as though we are meeting the spending limits specified by the administration, and yet the real level of authorized spending for the next six years - minus one day - is $295 billion." Congressman Jeff Flake, one of eight in the House to vote against the highway bill, told the Washington Post nobody believes the money will be remitted in 2009. "It's frankly a pretty transparent gimmick."

Hulse's piece includes a bunch more quotes from watchdog groups, so read that in full for those.

The fiscal trickery being engaged in by this Administration, aided and abetted by a Congress intent, as John McCain has said, on spending like a drunken sailor, is shameful. It's nothing but an outrageous collusion to defraud the American people so that congressmen and senators can run home and tout all their new pork projects (including a $230 million bridge in Anchorage literally named "Don Young's Way" after the chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, as well as almost 6,400 other "special projects").

Fiscal discipline, as the Washington Post also notes today in a lengthy article, is in a right sad state of affairs. We have a president who uses every trick in the book to avoid vetoing a spending bill, regardless of how far over the line it goes - and who insists on more tax cuts, more spending, and thus more deficits as far as the eye can see. We have a Congress who understands that the president's not serious about fiscal discipline, so they're going to spend as much as they want, with no fear whatsoever of any real demands for belt-tightening from this profligate White House.

Rescission is budget-speak. In layman's terms, it's just spending more of your money to make sure that incumbent legislators get reelected and this president doesn't have to face fiscal facts. Enough is enough.