The Old Bait and Switch

This is a popular tactic. Today it applies to the budget an an article by Cal Thomas. One popular technique of some conservatives (and some liberals too, actually) is to pull out some particularly egregious budget expenditures, as Mr. Thomas does here.

Other "golden eggs" laid by the Congressional geese include $450,000 for the Baseball Hall of Fame, $200,000 for the Dennison Railroad Depot Museum in Ohio, $350,000 for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, $1.5 million for the Anchorage Museum/Transit intermodal depot in Alaska, $250,000 for the Country Music Hall of Fame, $100,000 for the Municipal Swimming Pool in Ottawa, Kan., $35,000 for the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame, $300,000 to build the Great Falls parking garage in Auburn, Maine, and $1.5 million for departing Congressman Richard Gephardt's archive at the Missouri Historical Society.

Let's see what we got here. Nine items. Six of them are museums of one kind or another. One is a swimming pool, one a parking garage. And finally we have a plan to preserve the papers of Richard Gephardt. I have to say I don't have much problem with any of these items. I like museums. I think the government should help to preserve our culture, even if that culture is something like Country Music. I think it's telling that Cal Thomas picks Museums as his target.

On a side note, Tom Tomorrow captured a quote from Rush Limbaugh back in the nineties that Cal Thomas, a fellow talk show guy, might enjoy. "I don't go to museums because they don't have golf carts . . . If you put a golf cart in a museum I'll go. You can get around a lot faster."

Anyway back to the old bait and switch. Let's take the most expensive item on the list--$1.5 million to preserve the papers of Richard Gephardt (who, as a liberal, can go to hell). Sounds like a lot, doesn't it? Well the President's proposed 2005 budget has expenditures of $2,853 billion. So to put that in perspective, all that money wasted on preserving the papers of a long-time and influential member of congress? Comes to approximately 0.0000526% of the total budget. Reading down in Mr. Thomas's article we see that Citizens Against Government Waste has rounded up all of these wasteful type programs and their total comes to nearly $23 billion in wasteful projects. Let's be charitable and round up to the nearest billion. That still only accounts for 0.81% of the budget.

Here's where the switch part comes. Cal Thomas has dozens of other massive programs he wants you to support. Things like a national sales tax (because the poor have it too easy in this country). Things like passing a non-defined taxpayer bill of rights. Somehow tort reform (in other words making it harder for citizens to defend themselves against corporations on the theory that Americans can't be trusted to sit on juries) will also help with the budget as well.

The one thing Mr. Thomas is hoping you don't think about is the other side of the equation. A budget involves two parts, an input and an output. Revenues and expenditures. Maybe having the wealthy among us pay a bit more would somehow allow us to let the kids of Ottawa Kansas to have a swimming pool.