Politicians in Washington are not good stewards of your money. When they spend your tax dollars, they do it for their own benefit, not yours.
We’re being reminded of that once again as Congress wrangles with a pair of bills whose cost is measured in trillions of dollars, both of which are packed with pork and wasteful spending hidden behind a veneer of superficial policy promises.
When I was the state treasurer in Ohio, I had the crazy idea of putting our state’s spending on the internet for everyone to see. Politicians hated it, but taxpayers loved it.
The whole point was to transfer the power from the politicians to the people and thereby empower ordinary citizens to hold their elected representatives’ feet to the fire. Essentially, by putting all spending online, we crowdsourced the auditing process by creating an army of citizen auditors.
I did that because I was tired of watching Democrats and squishy RINO Republicans treat the public coffers like their own personal piggy banks. When politicians and bureaucrats waste taxpayer money, they’re spitting in the face of hardworking people who bust their butts to provide for their families and do the right thing. The money we pay in taxes doesn’t belong to government or public officials. It belongs to the taxpayers.
The folks in Washington don’t see it that way, though. Recently, members of both parties got together and crafted a plan to spend over $1 trillion of our hard-earned dollars on a so-called infrastructure bill that allocates immense amounts of money to projects that no reasonable person would ever include under even the most expansive definition of “infrastructure.”
The bill sets aside tens of billions of dollars for initiatives to reduce “racial and gender inequities” in STEM education, make school lunches “greener,” and subsidize child care facilities. It also includes a whopping $174 billion for electric vehicle subsidies — more than it proposes to spend on modernizing roads and bridges.
The bill also uses a variety of shady accounting gimmicks to disguise the true extent of Washington’s spending ambitions. These include allowing companies to underfund pensions in order to beef up corporate tax revenues, counting “savings” from suspending expensive regulations created by the very same legislation, and even selling oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve — a risky gambit that could easily force the country to replenish the reserve in a moment of crisis for a much higher price.
Worst of all, the $1 trillion-plus “infrastructure” bill, which passed the Senate with 19 Republican votes, sets the stage for an even bigger kick in the teeth to taxpayers: the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill that Democrats are hoping to pass on a party-line vote. It’s not as though the RINOs who voted for the first bill were hoodwinked, either. The Democrats were remarkably open and honest about their plans to “link” the two bills from the very start as part of a delicate balancing act designed to placate the party’s progressive and centrist wings.
If Republicans had forced the Democrats to use reconciliation on infrastructure, we would most likely be talking today about a single bill costing less than $2 trillion, rather than two monstrosities that together put taxpayers on the hook for nearly $5 trillion in mostly wasteful spending. Instead, RINOs gave the “infrastructure” bill credibility, and in so doing, they emboldened far-left Democrats to push for even more mind-boggling levels of spending.
A few years ago, Sen. Rand Paul delivered a blistering speech calling out his colleagues for being too cowardly to take a stand against the wasteful spending that is steadily turning our national debt into a crippling economic burden.
“We need Congress to stand up on its own two feet and say enough is enough,” the Kentucky Republican said in 2016. “We are reclaiming the power of the purse, and we are going to do whatever is necessary to get rid of the wasteful spending, the duplicative spending, and the offensive spending.”
If Republicans had gone along with him then, we would certainly be in a far different, and far better, position today. Instead, we are staring down the business end of a double-barreled shotgun of fiscal insanity.
The only way out of our mess is for voters to recognize that most politicians in Washington are spending our tax money for their own benefit, not for ours, and to start demanding real accountability from elected officials.
Josh Mandel, a former Ohio treasurer and a Marine Corps veteran, is running for U.S. Senate in Ohio.
