Budget Buster

Friends, you know that I'm not usually one to bring up the Federal budget. It's a subject of only vague interest to me, and probably to you. But it has occurred to me that while we have been busy being vaguely disinterested, the other side, whose interest in such things is acute, has been formulating something of an 'end around', to use a football cliche. Football: now there's something to catch our interest!

And speaking of interest,

In Fiscal Year 2006, the U. S. Government spent $406 Billion of your money on interest payments* to the holders of the National Debt. Compare that to NASA at $15 Billion, Education at $61 Billion, and Department of Transportation at $56 Billion.

While that site pushes a balanced budget amendment as a solution, the real solution is to change the conversation toward ways to shrink the Federal budget, and keep it shrunk. Those departments may be smaller than the debt, but while paying less on the debt causes greater expense in the future, paying less to DoEd and DoT can help us pay the debt down.

The people know that government is too big, and growing bigger all the time. We should be talking about ways to make the government smaller, not make it bigger. But an obscene growth in the Federal budget is what the immigration bill (which I shall not name) would accomplish.

As Mr. Redrum points out a The Minority Report, The Heritage Foundation's Robert Rector has crunched it out for us:

According to Rector’s numbers, the US Government acquires an additional $500K in lifetime deficit (for the sake of this estimate, lifetime = 25 years of welfare expenditures) for every current illegal alien given a class Z visa. Assuming a conservative estimate of 10M illegals currently, and assuming the bill’s security features work so well that no new illegals ever get in, that’s a bill of $5T
[...]
To put this financial disaster in proper perspective, the US Government currently owes about $8.8T in current obligations. If we assume our budget will balance every year for the next 30 years, with the exception of this immigration bill’s new expenses, we will have a deficit on the order of $13.8T. All alone, this bill adds 36% to the US national debt.

Redrum's piece is a worthwhile read, being a nice takedown of a race-baiter, so head over to TMR to check it out.

When government grows, taxes grow and liberty recedes. But then, proponents of the bill probably find that encouraging.

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