chamber of congress

The “Kick The Can” Democrats

Posted 3/31/11 at 10:54am by jamie

Want to know why Democrats keep having problems? Because on every single issue they play this game of “kick the can”. It’s the procrastination party!. Here’s the latest example:

Democrats want to take the offensive and propose higher tax rates for millionaires, companies that move factories overseas and wealthy people who make charitable contributions.

But here’s the problem – they want to do this in 2012! So while companies like G.E. and Bank of America continue to rake in record profits and pay $0 in taxes, we will continue to see things that matter to a majority of American’s cut.

Does this seem like DejaVu? Well it should. Think back to the healthcare debate, when Democrats kept kicking the can on getting American’s better coverage. After constant caving, we were told that it “would be fixed later”. I knew as soon as I heard that that later meant never. I had some bloggers tell me I was wrong on this, but here we are a year later and nothing has even been attempted to fix it.

This is total failure of leadership on the part of Democrats. We control the White House and one chamber of Congress, yet they sit there and act like the Republicans control everything. When we did control everything, they acted like the Republicans control everything. Do the brains in the Democratic Party really thing this is a way to increase voter enthusiasm? It sure as hell didn’t work last year and it won’t work again in 2012.

I don’t know about you, but I am sick and tired of the “oh well, maybe later” attitude of the Democratic Party, all the way up to the Oval Office.

Cost Of Reading Constitution On House Floor, $1.1 Million. Reneging On Financial Responsibility, Priceless!

Posted 1/6/11 at 11:01am by jamie

So the party of “financial responsibility” is going to spend about $1.1 million just on reading the Constitution on the House floor:

The amount I get is nearly $1.1 million. $1,071,872.87, to be exact, though of course this is more back-of-the-envelope than exact.

When one chamber of Congress is in session but not working, we the people still have to pay for members’ salaries and expenses, and for their police protection, and for keeping their lights and phones and coffee machines on. Even Eric Cantor (R-VA) and Mike Pence (R-IN) combined don’t blow enough hot air to heat the Capitol in January.

To get this estimate, I took the total FY 2011 costs for House salaries and expenses and House office buildings, then added half the costs of joint House-Senate expenses, the CBO, the Capitol Police and the Capitol power plant. Then I divided that sum by 205, the number of days the House was in session last year, then divided again by 24 (the number of hours in a day) and multiplied by 3 (the estimated length in hours of members reading the Constitution). It might not take three hours to read the document, but on the other hand, Congress is usually in session for considerably less than 205 days a year. Also, I didn’t include staff costs, since most aides will probably be working through the reading. But not all will be, so overall I think this is a conservative estimate.

Of course the wingnuts are already in full defense of this, just the same way they defended Bush and the GOP’s runaway spending during the last decade.

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