Tightening the Belt
The annual budget dance is underway on Capitol Hill – lawmakers are trying to pass appropriation bills before October 1 so that the federal government can keep on spinning. This year, there’s a new twist.
In pushing through the big tax cut – $1.35 trillion over the next decade – lawmakers agreed to an overall budget plan. That plan says that Congress must not let its total appropriations for the next fiscal year top $66l billion, including $6 billion more that President Bush is seeking for non-defense programs.
Note that Congress can choose to ignore its own budget plan – but the Senate will do so at its peril. If the Senate stays within that $66l billion, then the budget needs only a simple majority vote, i.e. by one vote, for approval. However, if spending goes above that, any budget would need 60 senators’ votes to pass.
The tax bill was passed when the Senate was politically split 50/50, with Republicans heading committees because the president is a Republican. Committee controls later shifted to the Democrats when Vermont Senator James Jeffords left the Republican party to go independent.
Senator Kent Conrad (D-ND), now chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said that containing spending as the president would like is “fiction.” He went on to say that what with increased spending for defense and education, “the whole thing falls apart.”
Tom Daschle (D-SD), when assuming leadership of the Senate after the political shift, went on record as saying that “polarized positions are an indulgence, an indulgence that the Senate cannot afford and our nation will not tolerate.” This is the same Daschle who, anticipating the change in Senate leadership, called the tax cut legislation “tax fraud in more ways than one,” pledging that the Senate “will revisit these issues” to try to “make corrections.”
It’s clear that the administration – at least publicly – intends to try to keep congressional feet to the fire on spending. “Our intention is to enforce the numbers in the budget,” said Chris Ullman, White House budget office spokesman. That means that overall spending cannot increase more than four percent from current levels.
Energy Rewards
President Bush is asking Congress to okay his energy plan that would beef up production, allow more tax credits for using renewable energy sources, as well as offer other measures geared toward providing relief from high energy costs. It’s not clear exactly what materials will qualify as “renewable.” Biomass, the plan says, qualifies. But will biomass mean only plants grown specifically for energy purposes, or will it include, for example, chicken litter or grease from rendering?
The state of California, which has made headlines with its energy crunch and boasts an agriculture industry of $27 billion a year, has its own energy plan: Agricultural Peakload Reduction Program. The program, geared to reduce electricity use this summer, is offering money to ag-related energy users who:
• Install highly energy-efficient equipment, including refrigerators and cold storage, as well as automated control systems;
• Retrofit or replace ag water pumps;
• Install advanced metering and telemetry equipment to enhance load management;
• Retrofit natural gas-powered equipment to burn alternative fuels – meaning all sources except unmodified diesel, gasoline, or natural gas that are legally permissible.
There is $75 million in the kitty. The most any one recipient can get is up to 65 percent of the actual costs of qualifying modifications, as long as that doesn’t exceed $2 million. Participants must allow access so that state officials can verify that peak
electricity use is indeed being cut.
Goodies Getting Out of Hand
Bipartisanship in congressional spending? Has there ever been such a thing?
The past is replete with congressional pork barreling where congressmen who head, or even sit on, powerful committees make sure their constituents back home get plenty of goodies. The appropriation bills before Congress contain literally thousands of these “earmarks.”
White House budget chief Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr., agreed that such earmarks are “sort of a natural, traditional part of the process.” But, he added, “it’s gotten out of hand.” According to the federal Office of Management and Budget, Congress got through 1,724 earmarked projects in l993; 3,746 in 2000; 6,454 for the current fiscal year.
Congressman Bill Young (R-FL), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, would remind his fellow Republicans in the administration that the U.S. Constitution gave Congress authority to dole out money.
P.S. – The administration, for example, wants to knock out several million dollars earmarked in the agriculture budget for research grants to specific universities. Science, said White House budget man Daniels, shouldn’t be driven by “political muscle.”
Genetics on the Loose
The federal Center for Disease Control concluded that none of the 17 people who said they had allergic reactions to genetically engineered corn had, in fact, reacted to the special protein in StarLink corn. The corn products eaten by the 17 were from yellow corn. White corn was presumed to be StarLink-free.
Yet, after this announcement, one of the 17 persons who had complained about a reaction claimed he had suffered once again – this time from chips made from white corn. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tested – and found – StarLink in that product, thus shooting down the theory that genetically engineered species can be “contained.”
Critics, of course, were saying, “We told you so!” Ag groups, such as the National Corn Growers Association, were saying that it’s time to get realistic and set “acceptable tolerances” for when genetically engineered products show up somewhere unintended, “rather than demand absolute purity.”
Setting tolerance levels for genetically engineered plants or animals that get “loose” would, however, require the federal government to decide which agency or agencies would be responsible. Take the case of fast-growing salmon being developed in Canada.
Consumer and environmental groups recently lobbied the FDA to block the possible sale of these salmon that have been engineered to produce more growth hormone. FDA has classified the genetic change as a drug. However, these same groups have petitioned the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Commerce Department, Interior (Fish and Wildlife Service), and Defense (the Army Corp of Engineers). Reason: Any of these agencies could claim regulatory rights – anywhere from considering the salmon a food, or an exotic species best kept away from our waters, to viewing it as a threat to endangered species.
Briefly:
• In the syndicated comic strip B.C., a guy tells his banker that he’d like to borrow money to raise swine. The banker then asks him what experience has he had. “I served in the Senate for six years,” the guy replied. The banker’s response: “Sorry, pal, you’re overqualified.”
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, that great composer who died in his thirties back in 179l, may have succumbed to trichinosis (a yet-to-be discovered disease back then). His fever, rash, and swollen limbs have been attributed by more modern-day researchers to rheumatic fever, heart attack, or poisoning. A researcher in a recent issue of Archives of Internal Medicine notes, however, that Mozart – 44 days before he died – wrote to his wife: “What do I smell. . .pork cutlets. I eat to your health.” Trichinosis has an incubation period of up to 50 days.
August 2001 Render