How Corrupt is Congress?

Today's Washington Examiner editorial argues that the convictions of Bob Ney and Randy Cunningham and the criminal indictment of William Jefferson may well be just the tip of an iceberg of corruption in Congress. While federal prosecutors don’t claim Jefferson used earmarks in his solicitations, let it be noted that the same disdain for the public trust epitomized in ...

U.S. Defense Spending Below Average?

The U.S. Defense Budget is, to put it mildly, rather large. The FY 2008 budget authority for defense is a staggering $508 billion, with expected outlays of $516.5. As has been pointed out numerous times here and elsewhere, we're quite literally spending more on defense than all other countries on the face of the earth combined. ...

Congress, Bush Mum on Earmarks

Mark Tapscott reports that Congress refuses to identify by name the Members that put earmarks into the federal budget and that the Bush administration, through the institution of the Office of Management and Budget, has no plans to do anything about this. No, I'm not surprised, either. UPDATE: Bill Allison of the Sunlight Foundation notes that OMB is ...

CPAC - Mitt Romney

Governor Mitt Romney came by Bloggers Row after his CPAC speech and I got the chance to shake his hand and ask him a few questions. His pitch, like that of most candidates, is very high level and platitudinous: Cut government spending, change the culture of Washington, increase efficiency, reach across the aisle, and so forth. ...

Caption Contest Winners

The Spam King and I Edition OTB Caption ContestTM is now over. (AP Photo/Sang Tan) The Winners: First: DaveD - The 2008 federal budget is sent to the White House for the President's signature Second: McGehee - "But Sen. Clinton, your husband was happy to accept campaign contributions from us!" Third: FormerHostage - Brittany Spears suffers a wardrobe malfunction at the ...

Democrats, Republicans and the Deficit

hilzoy, reflecting on a pay-per-view Paul Krugman column arguing that, for political reasons, "Given a choice between cutting the deficit and spending more on good things like health care reform, Democrats in Congress should choose the spending," observes, [I]t has not escaped my notice that Democrats' hard work at cutting the deficit, and our willingness to postpone a lot of things ...

Liberaltarian Fissures

Jonathan Chait has a belated but quite amusing critique of the recent "Liberaltarian" boomlet about a supposed natural libertarian-liberal axis. Two key passages get at the heart of it: But, as Newt Gingrich learned to his dismay, support for smaller government as an abstract proposition almost never translates into opposition to government as it actually exists. The vast bulk of ...

Taxing the Rich

Ben Stein, he of "Ferris Bueller" and "Win Ben Stein's Money" fame, had a meeting with mega-billionaire Warren Buffett and came away thinking that we should tax rich people more. Mr. Buffett compiled a data sheet of the men and women who work in his office. He had each of them make a fraction; the numerator was how much they paid ...

Mike Pence and John Shadegg To Run for Minority Leadership

Erick Erricson breaks news that Mike Pence and John Shadegg are going to run for Minority Leader and Minority Whip. Great news, indeed. Both are reasonably conservative--and fiscal conservatives, at that--and untainted with the stench of the scandals that helped transform the current Majority into the incoming Minority. Rob Bluey has details: As the conservative leader of the GOP in ...

CBO: October Monthly Budget Review

The Congressional Budget Office's Monthly Budget Review for October had some good news. CBO estimates that the federal budget deficit was about $250 billion in fiscal year 2006, around $68 billion less than the shortfall recorded in 2005. Relative to the size of the economy, that deficit was equal to 1.9 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP), down from 2.6 ...