I don’t know how many of you are on Jim Nussle’s email list, but yesterday’s edition nearly put me into a coma—its noxious photos, mind numbing stories of lemonade stands and lunches, and exceptional ability to kill the interesting somehow combine the worst aspects of a PowerPoint presentation with granny’s grand canyon slide show. In short—it is an unholy alliance between boredom and idiocy.
Of course, it does provide a few opportunities for fun.
“Jim’s Journal,” as it’s called, tells us that Jim is doing what every other self-respecting candidate in the state does this time of year—he’s spending significant time at the internationally-acclaimed Iowa State fair. Of course, Jim has something else in common with too many politicians—wherever he is, he seems to be at the same tricks.
Indeed, true to form, Jim did what he does best. He served up pork.
Heck, Jim’s been doing it for years.
As House Budget Chairman he presided over the evaporation (er, trickledown?) of hundreds of billions of dollars. Where’d it all go? Sure, tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans played a huge part, as did Halliburton contracts. But another often overlooked culprit was the astronomical growth in pork barrel spending that picked up speed in the early 90’s and only accelerated under Nussle’s tenure as HBC.
Now, one can’t blame all pork on Nussle—Congress is stuffed with chronic earmarkers like a pig with an apple down its throat—but when Jim first got to the hill in 1991, spending on pet project earmarks totaled 3.1 billion dollars. In 2006, that number was 29.3 billion dollars. In his five years as House Budget Chairman, pork barrel spending went up in every one. In 2001, when he took control of the Committee, earmarks hovered around 7,000. By 2005, that number had nearly doubled.
And earmarks under the reign of king Nussle have been especially egregious. According to the conservative Citizens Against Government Waste, this year’s budget includes:
$13,500,000 for the International Fund for Ireland, which helped finance the World Toilet Summit; $6,435,000 for wood utilization research; $1,000,000 for the Waterfree Urinal Conservation Initiative; and $500,000 for the Sparta Teapot Museum in Sparta, N.C.
Thankfully, Nussle’s reign in the House is over. Here’s to making sure we don’t let him do for Iowa what he did in Congress. Iowans—let’s not be what we eat.
P.S. Do us a favor Jim—keep the “journal” to yourself. Diaries are self-indulgent.
August 12th, 2006
The Register editorializes today on the apparent tension between traditional Republican talking points and actual Republican performance:
This was a bizarre week in federal budget politics, as usual. Everything about the federal budget is bizarre. To wit:
President Bush bragged about “reducing” the red ink this year to “only” $296 billion. That will be the fourth largest deficit in history and only a modest improvement from last year’s $318 billion deficit. That’s hardly cause for celebration.
Locally, Republican congressional candidate Jeff Lamberti said pork-barrel spending is out of control and the federal budget process is broken.
He got that right, but it takes a large dose of chutzpah for Lamberti to cite it as a reason for people to elect him instead of Democratic incumbent Leonard Boswell.
Recall that the last time the Democrats controlled Congress, they produced healthy budget surpluses that put the country on a path toward paying down the national debt.
When Republicans took control of Congress and the White House, they promptly boosted spending while cutting taxes, producing the worst fiscal mess of modern times.
When Republican challengers in Congressional races run their “we need a change” campaigns (which every challenger’s campaign will at some point say), whom do they think they’re railing against? Maybe someone needs to ask Jeff Lamberti exactly which parts of the Bush (and Nussle) budgets he’s against in specific enough terms that he actually has to answer the question. Odds are he couldn’t think of anything he’d want to mention by name.
July 13th, 2006
Nussle is often mentioned in the context of large sums of money, but this time we’re not talking about the unprecedented national deficit. The Cedar Rapids Gazette reported today that Nussle has made the first TV ad buy of the 2006 gubernatorial election:
The 30-second ads tout his agenda and his role as chairman of the House Budget Committee. The commercials, scheduled to begin airing this weekend, will try to show Nussle as “a leader in the fight to control spending and clean up the House Ethics scandal.”
Campaign aides said the commercials will run on both cable and broadcast stations statewide. The cost of the ads is $500,000.
Well, that’s an interesting angle for these ads to play. Maybe Nussle’s staff is making these claims about Nussle’s supposed success in controlling spending (something he has actually failed miserably at) on TV at a time when they know that (1) Democrats are too focused on each other to put many resources towards fighting this and (2) the Democratic candidates just can’t afford this widespread a TV buy this early in the year. We need to make sure this story doesn’t go away, so here are the facts:
Before Nussle (according to the CBO in 2000): $236 Billion Surplus
After Nussle (according to the CBO in 2004): $412 Billion Deficit
It’s that simple. Nussle sucked at managing the budget.
April 21st, 2006
