Indy Star has an editorial entitled Trim highway bill or kill it outright
According to the Star, a federal highway bill that both Sens. Bayh and Lugar voted for is in conference committee. It’s expensive and laden with pork. They urge Pres. Bush to veto it.
I’m a little torn here. Government spending on transportation infrastructure is one of the good things the federal government can do. I’d prefer to see the feds spending money there than more wasteful undertakings like entering into a war of choice in Iraq. But, given that Congress and the President have already chosen to blow their budget on spending in Iraq, a hugely expensive highway bill with no source of funding increases will increase the deficit even more. Balanced budgets are of primary importance in a healthy economy, in my opinion. (Though, it’s my understanding as a non-economist, that sometimes deficit spending is necessary in a Keynesean pump priming situation to get the economy going — that’s not how we’ve been spending our federal money lately.)
These deficits highlight the need for a bit of gridlock in Congress. Seems like our best budget balancing experience in the past 30 years has been a Democratic President and a Republican Congress. (We overspent during the Reagan/Bush I years when we had the reverse. And, we’ve overspent during the Bush II years when we had Republican control. The only balanced budgets we’ve had in recent memory are the Clinton years.)
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