Florida, Michigan and the Jackass That Overreached

The Florida and Michigan Democratic Parties tried to improve their positions in the presidential primaries knowing full well the consequences. Now they’re scrambling to get their delegates reinstated with “do-over” primaries that would give both states an unfair advantage.

Maybe both state parties should pay a price for setting in motion this scramble to be among the first states to vote. Violating rules that you agreed to in order to go early shouldn’t be rewarded with the privilege of going last.

The irony is that going early wouldn’t necessarily have helped either state influence the nomination; look at the influence voters in Ohio and Texas have had, while many Iowans and New Hampshirites voted for candidates who are no longer even in the race.

The voters in Florida and Michigan have been screwed, but not by the DNC. They were screwed by their shortsighted state party leaders.

With apologies to Aesop:

A donkey with an apple in its mouth once walked across a bridge. In the pond below, it thought it saw another donkey with a bigger, redder apple. The donkey reached down for the reflection of its apple, and dropped the real apple instead.

Moral: that’s what happens when jackasses overreach.

Newsprism

Bottom Line—A Cool Trillion

The figures below were downloaded from USASpending.gov, the federal government’s official budget web site/scandal sheet.

USASpending.gov was mandated by the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act. When President Bush signed the act, he said:

This bill is going to create a website that will list the federal government’s grants and contracts. It’s going to be a website that the average citizen can access and use. It will allow Americans to log onto the Internet just to see how your money is being spent. This bill will increase accountability and reduce incentives for wasteful spending.

Lovely. Now we know what we’re getting for our $3,000,000,000,000.00 federal budget. For one thing, we get a website that tells us we just spent $3,000,000,000,000.00!

In 2000, the last year under Clinton, the government spent $1.81 trillion. The bottom line during the Bush administration looks like this (in trillions of dollars):

2001: $2.03   2002: $2.28   2003: $2.52   2004: $2.52

2005: $2.6   2006: 2.87   2007: TBA   2008: TBA

The federal budget for 2007 hasn’t been calculated yet. If we didn’t hit the $3 trillion dollar mark last year, we’ll hit it this year. That means that as we near the end of the Bush administration, this President and this Congress have increased the size of government by more than 33%–an increase of a trillion dollars this year alone.

At this rate, during fiscal years 2001-2009, the federal government will have grown by about SIX TRILLION DOLLARS.

And the Democrats are proposing more and larger government programs?

Who do they think they are? George Bush?

Newsprism