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This should eliminate all doubts about how little some members of Congress understand about federal finances.
As Dana Milbank explains in his column from today's The Washington Post, eight House Republican freshman made a grandstanding play this week to get public attention and credit for something that makes no financial sense whatsoever.
First, the eight representatives didn't spend all of the amount they got in 2011 from the House of Representatives to pay for staff and other expenses in their Washington and district offices. They correctly claimed that they saved taxpayers money by doing so.
But second, the representatives then said that they wanted to return the unspent money to the Treasury and designate that the funds be used to reduce the national deb. They clearly felt that they should get big props for doing this.
This is wrong on so many levels that it's hard to know where to start.
For some reason the dollar coin keeps coming up.
A press release in my inbox yesterday announced that Senators Tom Harkin (D-IA) and John McCain (R-AZ) had introduced the "Currency Optimization, Innovation and National Savings (COINS) Act" that would create yet another dollar coin. This is the Senate version of a bill introduced in the House last year.
Here are two easy-and-quick-to-read pieces on the magnitude of the military spending changes Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta actually announced last week. The simple answer according to two people who know is that the reductions are less than the headlines indicated.
First, over at the Will and the Wallet, CG&G alum Gordon Adams did this very nice post about how what Panetta announced is "promising" in the sense that it shows there is finally the start of a meaningful shift in DOD strategy that could lead to significant savings. But Gordon says the proposal is also "dangerous" because the plans leaves "the long term budget trajectory...unrealistically high" and will leave Pentagon planners with the notion that they'll have more to spend in the future than will be the case.
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) apparently thinks the root cause of all our budget problems is changing the budget process. My column from today's Roll Call explains why, even though changes are needed, what he's proposing and when he's proposing it is an attempt to do something without actually doing anything.
Change the Budget Process? Give Us All a Break
You would think that the deficit and national debt that many in Congress keep telling us are way too big would prompt a serious discussion about what should be done that has at least some prospect of actually succeeding.
But what instead is being proposed as salvation from our devil-sent combination of fiscal afflictions and budget transgressions? Apparently, all we have to do to be delivered is to change the Congressional budget process.
It was just two weeks ago that I explained why OMB directors in general are seen as good White House chiefs of staff by the presidents they serve.
In a very strong piece in today's The Washington Post, Ezra Klein explained why one particular former OMB Director -- Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels -- was never going to be the strong presidential candidate some were saying he would be and is not the savior some in the GOP are looking for.
Ezra's analysis about Daniels can easily be broadened to OMB directors in general: With very rare exceptions they're just not right for today's presidential politics. The top five reasons are:
My Beautiful and Talented Wife (The BTW) and I have both been caught by speed cameras -- several times for each of us -- in recent years. So before you start screaming that I would feel differently if it had happened to me, please keep in mind that it has and my opinion is still the same.
This is all prompted by this story in The Washington Post about local celebrity chef Geoff Tracy being unhappy about being caught speeding three times by the cameras in his neighborhood. Note that Chef Geoff doesn't say that he wasn't speeding, only that he didn't like being caught and having to pay the fine.
I don't like paying fines either, but I do like it when a government does something efficiently and that's what speed cameras are: a highly efficient way to enforce existing law.
It was several years ago during the Q&A portion of a presentation I was giving about the federal deficit in a VERY socially and fiscally conservative suburb of Detroit that I was asked a simple and very sincere question: Why doesn't the federal government legalize heroin and crack and then tax the sales?
I was stunned both by the question and by the people who were asking it. They were asking about the mechanics of how it would work, how much revenue legalization would bring in, etc. They were specifically asking about heroin and crack.
And they were completely serious.
Which is why this story by Anita Kumar from yesterday's The Washington Post about a Virginia delegate introducing a bill to figure out how much revenue the state would bring in if it legalized marijuana wasn't as shocking to me as it otherwise might have been.
If this clip from earlier today in the House floor when Rep. Gabrielle Gifford (D-AZ) resigned doesn't make you at least a little teary, you have no soul.
Last night' State of the Union Address almost certainly made deficit hawks very unhappy, extremely angry and, from a policy perspective, close to suicidal. After pushing hard for so long to make the deficit the issue, it was barely a footnote in the president's hour-plus address and wasn't missed that much.
It took less than an hour for the Committee for a Responsible Budget to send out a statement excoriating the White House for missing "...an opportunity to throw down the gauntlet to Congress on the debt and demand a large, bipartisan debt reduction plan this year."
If the speech is an indication, the administration has no interest in throwing gauntlets or anything else on the budget this year.
I was surprised. With Congress unwilling or unable to do much of anything on the budget, I had expected the White House to call for the House and Senate to deal with the budget and to offer to meet anytime, any place, etc. At the very least this would have put it in a good position to be critical when that didn't happen.
