On Election Year Bribery...

To my loyal readers (both of you):
I've been overwhelmed with questions from some (read: one) of you about the nickname I used to describe House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Democrat from the mythical 666th Congressional district where money evidently grows on trees). As memory serves (from yesterday) I referred to her as Nancy "the $600 Stimulator" Pelosi. Understandably some of you thought that this was some sort of suggestion that I believe her to be a moderately priced call girl specializing in things that I won't specifically mention for fear of alienating my valued Conservative base. It is an election year after all, I have to keep myself on a short leash.
I want to set the record straight here and now, to reassure my readers, and Ms. Pelosi's legal team that I was in no way implying that the Speaker of the House sells her body for money. Quite to the contrary actually, Pelosi sells the financial future of our nation.

To her credit, the Speaker doesn't do this to enrich herself, she's wealthy enough that she doesn't need the money, but instead to further her political aspirations. As Speaker of the House since early 2007, she has mostly ignored the law that requires all new spending to be accounted for with either commensurate spending cuts elsewhere in the budget, or new tax revenues. There have been many versions of this law over the years, but the general philosophy behind them all is known as "PAYGO"- short for "Pay as you Go." More information on the language of it can be found by going to http://www.thomas.gov/ and searching H.CON.RES.99. I wouldn't recommend it though, tyring to find the real meaning in the text of modern laws is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. And at the risk of briefly derailing my train of thought, I suspect that this is by design sadly. It's a lot easier to pass crumby laws if no one knows how to interpret them.

Back to business. The fact that a legislator has ignored the law is not by itself particularly remarkable, but what does make it remarkable is that this is legislation that Congresswoman Pelosi sponsored as part of the federal budget for the 2008 fiscal year. The press release from the Speaker's office regarding the law can be found here:
http://speaker.house.gov/newsroom/pressreleases?id=0122
The most blatant example of her failure to obey her own rules is the Economic Stimulus act of 2008, passed into law earlier this year and sponsored in chief by the Speaker.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/D?d110:1:./temp/~bd0bGa:@@@L&summ2=m&/bss/d110query.html
We've all heard about this in the news, essentially the government is sending everyone either $600, $1200, or $2400 depending on your relative fertility and/or aversion to contraceptives. What the law doesn't do, however, is explain what spending cuts or new revenues will subsidize this $152 billion handout that is conveniently being distributed right before an election. The speaker avoided illegalities by passing it as an emergency spending measure, which do not have to comply with the the spending rules agreed to when the budget for that year was passed. Essentially, the federal budgetary process is not unlike my own efforts to budget my personal finances, I set rules, and break them almost immediately.

Maddeningly, emergency spending measures are not exclusively used in emergencies, in fact the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been almost entirely paid for out of emergency spending bills. As a result of all this excess spending the nation has spiraled into over $9 trillion worth of public debt. More information on our public debt can be found at the website for my Congressman, Representative Michael Capuano, whom I'd like to take the opportunity to show some love to for practicing the congressional version of 'keepin' it real' by being honest with the American public about the grim state of our nation's finances. Shout out to Big Mike.
http://www.house.gov/capuano/

What I don't understand is how a blip in the economy constitutes an emergency to Ms. Pelosi. I am well aware that there are many people out there who are losing their homes- but this is not due to an under-performing economy so much as it's a result of dumb bankers making bad loans to people with bad credit, people with good credit treating their home equity like a cash machine, and people buying more house than they can afford. Despite assertions by the talking heads on cable news, we are not yet in a recession. We experienced market corrections in the housing and stock markets at the same time and everyone panicked and yelled "recession", but if those talking heads actually paid attention to the print media they'd see that the economy actually grew in the first quarter of this year.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/30/business/30econ.html?scp=1&sq=economic+growth&st=nyt

Seeing as how the most common definition of an economic recession is two consecutive quarters of negative growth, I fail to see how our current economic situation qualifies as such, let alone an emergency. So Nancy Pelosi decided to put the nation a further $152 billion in debt because a lot of people think we're in a recession, not because we actually are. Well Nance, hindsight's always 20/20 I guess right? I mean, how could you, the third most powerful elected official in government, be expected to consider facts and figures and stuff when deciding how to use our national credit card?

Sarcasm aside, anyone recall hearing about how much the value of the dollar has lost against other world currencies over the past few years? Perhaps this will explain why that's happening:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt#Risks_to_the_U.S._dollar
To be fair, Speaker Pelosi is not entirely to blame for all our debt, this miserable state of affairs is due to years of bad governance on the part of all our elected representatives. But if we're going to fix it, it has to start with the Speaker of the House. Put the credit card away Ms. Pelosi. You don't need to send us all $600 to get us to vote for a Democrat for President. George "is it January 20th yet?" W. Bush is doing a fine job of that without you. Stop saddling our children and grandchildren with debt just to secure the Democratic Party's position as the marginally less despised political party in America.