Saturday, January 12, 2019

BORDER WALL IS AN INEFFECTIVE WASTE, DEMOCRATS SAY~ HERE'S THE REAL WASTE

BORDER WALL IS AN INEFFECTIVE WASTE, DEMOCRATS SAY~ HERE'S THE REAL WASTE
BY R. CORT KIRKWOOD
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research purposes:
 
Besides their false claim that a wall on the southern border of the United States would be “ineffective,” Democrats oppose a wall because it would “waste” taxpayer money.
Thus, they adamantly refused to provide money for a wall in the spending bill the House passed and the Senate didn’t.
Yet amazingly, the Democrats found plenty of money to fund for pet projects that provide no benefit to the American citizen whatsoever.
The list is long — and instructive. For Democrats, the end game is this: wasting money and open borders.
What They Will Fund
As the Office of Management and Budget noted of the Democratic spending bill passed in early January, “despite not meeting the minimum requirements identified by those who are directly responsible for the Nation’s border security, this package funds a number of unnecessary programs at excessive levels well beyond what was put forward in the FY 2019 Budget.”
The Democrats want “funding at levels nearly 20 percent higher than the President’s FY 2019 Budget,” the OMB reported.
Among the goodies the open-borders Democrats want are $12 billion more for international affairs programs, or 29 percent more than the president wanted. That includes $2.9 billion more for economic and development assistance to foreigners in the Middle East.
Why funding to Israel, Syria, and Pakistan is more important the security at the southern border of our own country is a mystery, as is the “$700 million more than requested for the United Nations, including restoring funding for the United Nations Population Fund.”
Of course, that funding contains money, OMB observed, that would “undermine the President’s Mexico City Policy ... which prohibits the funding of foreign nongovernmental organizations that promote or perform abortions.”
The House bill also included “$2 billion in excessive Environmental Protection Agency funding, providing funds beyond the Agency’s core mission and including funding for programs that can and should be executed at the local level.”
More unnecessary — and blatantly unconstitutional — spending includes $7.1 billion for “rental assistance programs” in the Housing and Urban Development Department, itself a massive unconstitutional agency.
And those are just the worthless programs OMB mentioned.
More Waste, Unconstitutional Spending
Citizens against Government Waste unearths much ridiculous and unconstitutional spending in its annual Prime Cuts Summary.
Among programs that are expending money that could be used to defend the border are these, which the summary reported in September just weeks before the border-wall fight began:
• Scrapping one program alone, the Rural Electrification Administration, could fund nearly two walls. Cutting the REA for one year would save $8.2 billion, or $41 billion through the next five years. Given that just about 100 percent of rural America now has electricity and phone service, why does Congress continue funding a program born in 1935?
• Stopping improper Medicare payments, the summary shows, would save $3.6 billion annually, or $18.1 billion through the next five years, or almost three times what the president wants for border security.
• Returning to HUD, eliminating Community Development Block Grants — again, unconstitutional spending — would save $3 billion annually.
• The United States contributes $10 billion annually to the anti-American United Nations, the creation of communists and one-worlders after World War II. UN funding should be cut entirely, but even knocking the U.S. contribution back 25 percent would save $2.5 billion.
• Eliminating sugar subsidies, the summary reports, would save $1.2 billion annually, while cutting dairy and peanut subsidies would save almost $300 million.
Annual savings on these programs? $18.8 billion. That’s enough to build three walls and return $1.7 billion to taxpayers.
Pelosi’s Lie
In her speech on Tuesday night that did not refute a single word of President Trump’s remarks from the Oval Office, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed that he will not agree to a bill to reopen the government “over his obsession with forcing American taxpayers to waste billions of dollars on an expensive and ineffective wall.”
If the wall would be ineffective, perhaps Pelosi and her partner in immigration crime, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, can explain why Israel built a (very effective) wall, and why Democrats continue voting to send foreign aid to Israel given that walls are a “waste” and “ineffective.”
And perhaps they can explain why they are “forcing American taxpayers to waste billions of dollars on ... expensive and ineffective” programs that benefit no one.
They can’t. And won’t.
They have two priorities, the first of which is sending tax money to their coalition of angry, anti-American special interests.
But the second, and more important to the wall debate, is this: Keeping the borders open to bring in future Democratic voters.
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