Editorial/Cavemen on die Hill
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIAL CAVEMEN ON THE HILL by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. It cannot be easy to be a United States congressman. I know it looks easy, all that smiling, schmoosing, and striking of heroic poses; but...
...This year nearly half of all federal spending will go toward maintaining this safety net, even with the Reagan administration's ceilings...
...Moreover, Time calculates that possibly as many as one-fourth of the Medicaid patients in nursing homes and mental institutions do not belong there...
...How much more comfortable and fitting it would be for them if their business were conducted in a cave...
...but the fact is that it must be very difficult for the solons of Capitol Hill actually to perform their public services on a hill...
...For months the right honorable gentlemen have been taking bows before the folks back home for passing the Gramm-Latta budget reconciliation bill, that historic bill which gave our thrifty, president the ceilings on expenditures he so dearly sought as a tool against inflation...
...Consider last month's humbug with the budget...
...Last month the pressure became intolerable...
...They conclude that a good many of the programs that were fattened up last month are extremely dubious, fraught with waste, corruption, and the kind of inefficiencies for which our Federal Government has grown legendary...
...If gypsy moths and the other blights upon our budgetary process really want to help the poor they will slay inflation...
...From these dark recesses lobbyists of the milch-cow state have been shaking their fists as the solons hunkered by...
...Such transactions are better concluded in dark places...
...Doubtless by the end of the year the cost will be...
...Alas, America has been making investments of this sort for over a decade, and today an increasing number of observers believe that America has put its money in far too many salted mines...
...Many of the honorable gentlemen capitulated, passing an $87.3 billion appropriations bill for social programs that blasted colossal holes through their own ceilings of last summer...
...Yet the corridors of Congress are honeycombed with nooks and crannies...
...In the 1950s, only one-fifth of our budget went toward such programs...
...Looking back on a decade of growth in the kind of social programs that were fattened up last month Daniel Patrick Moynihan stated in The Politics of a Guaranteed Income: "With astonishing consistency middle-class professionals . . . when asked to devise ways of improving the condition of lower-class groups would come up with schemes of which the first effect would be to improve the condition of middle-class professionals and the second effect might or might not be that of improving the condition of the poor.'' The humbug of last month has been going on for years...
...Of course the blubbering has already begun, for some of these great statesmen blubber at the least provocation...
...Do you think it was easy for them to pass that extravagant appropriations bill, the one that put donkey ears and a clown costume on budget ceilings which they themselves had passed last summer midst solemnity and self-congratulations nauseating to behold...
...It has led to enormous deficits and dreadful inflation...
...Obviously, if the waste and corruption of these programs alone were eliminated, last month's extravagant appropriation could have been fitted under the Reagan administration's budgetary ceilings...
...In truth, of course, it is not the poor who are in such desperate need of the programs of our milch-cow state but the middle-class tycoons of the poverty programs...
...When the money runs out the solons come forth blubbering for more lest there be starving in the streets...
...And was our welfare system, our "safety net," really "cut to shreds" by the Reagan budget ceilings as gypsy moth Bill Green declared...
...even higher...
...It is the custom on Capitol Hill intentionally to under-appropriate entitlement programs...
...One such program is food stamps, which Time magazine tells us "along with Medicare-Medicaid is the most scandal-tinged of entitlements, exceeding even welfare...
...They will live by last summer's ceilingsummer's ceilings...
...Not at all...
...Nor is this the last time that the taxpayers are going to be dunned for these social programs...
...the rip-off is estimated at about $1.5 billion a year...
...How is it that with this enormous increase in social spending things have grown so desperate for the poor...
...Thus last month we heard the Right Honorable Silvio 0. Conte of the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts pronounce: "This bill is America's investment in humanity...
...It was $3.9 billion over the president's budget request and $763 million over the Congress's own ceilings...
...Inflation gnaws at everyone's income, but it is most ruinous to those who have least...
Vol. 14 • December 1981 • No. 12
