Washington spends way too much money. That comment should come as no surprise to anyone with a brain. One of the reasons Congress spends too much money is earmarks. The Republicans have been hammering Rep. Murtha for his earmarks. That is as it should be. He is one of the biggest porkers in Congress. It turns out there were two Republicans that had a higher earmark total than did Rep. Murtha.

With a record like that, people are not going to vote Republican. People will say that it does not matter who is elected to Congress they will overspend. That is how we end up with so many Democrats who do not care at all about spending. There are some Republicans that do care about spending. They have a hard time getting elected because of idiots like those two that outspent Rep. Murtha in earmarks last year. We need more in leadership like my Rep. Jeff Flake. He did not take any earmarks last year. When he tried to get on the Appropriations Committee this year, he was rebuffed by the leadership. That should end if the Republicans want to be considered serious about being fiscal hawks. They should limit the people on the Appropriations Committee to people who have used the earmarks system the least. That will show the intent to rein in spending.

Another boondoggle in Congress is Nancy Pelosi’s relighting of the Capitol dome. The cost of the project is over $961,000. The cost to light the Capitol dome each year is $15,000. It would take 45 years to repay the cost of the project if the cost to light the dome is reduced to zero. The cost will not be reduced to zero, so the repayment period will be much longer. It will probably only save $2-3,000 per year. That would mean a repayment period of 300,000 years. The lights will be well worth the cost (heavy on the sarcasm). The other problem with the relighting project is that they rejected two lower bids to select this one. This one is from a company in the district represented by the chairman of the committee that is overseeing the project. This smells like a dead fish. There is obviously no graft in this Democrat led Congress (again, heavy on the sarcasm).

There is an AIDS project that is currently funded at $3 billion per year. The current Democrat led House wants to increase this project to $10 billion per year. That would increase our foreign aid budget by over 15% by itself. There is no need to increase this project to $10 billion from $3 billion. Most of the money increased would be wasted as most government money gets wasted, especially if it gets sent overseas as foreign aid of any kind.

This highlights the problems we have with our elected officials. They overuse the earmark program. There are probably good times to use the earmark program for things that come up too late to go through the regular budget process. It just gets over used by too many lawmakers. They should set a limit of 1 or 2 earmarks per year for lawmakers to use the earmarks. That way they would choose the projects more carefully. Right now, anyone who is a campaign contributor and asks for money gets funded by many of the users of the earmark program. They should also revise how the leadership chooses people for committee and leadership assignments. The biggest users of the earmarks would have the last choice for committee or leadership assignments. That would reward those Congressmen that are concerned with fulfilling their oath of office and improving the country. Those that want to abuse the system can be left out in the cold abusing the system, but they would be identified as such. They would not be mentioned in discussions about leadership or committees. That would get the attention of most of these power hungry people.

We do need government reform. There are some simple rules that would insure that we would have some real reform real fast. The first is my suggestion about those with the lowest earmarks getting the power and choicest committee assignments. With that in place, you can work on the problem of the contractors in the committee chairman’s district getting the bid to do contract work for the government. It should be that any contractor should be eliminated from consideration if they are from any committee member’s district, unless they are an only source. That would eliminate the problem with the lighting contract. The government could have purchased the lighting at a much lower cost from one of the two lower bids. If it can be shown that the bids were deficient in some way, then the rejection could be justified. It just stinks to high heaven right now. We need to eliminate the appearance of graft and collusion from our congressional people. The second rule would not work in the Senate as that would eliminate anyone from about a third of the states. That would be too impractical to work.

The reforms will never be installed. They are too practical. They would work to eliminate much of the problems in Washington. That is why they will not be installed. The people benefiting from the graft would have to vote to eliminate their graft. That will never happen unless they get caught in a big scandal and the news media would never to that to Democrats.