US House To Vote On $26 Billion Bailout

The U.S. House of Representatives will vote this week on $26 billion in “emergency aid” to state and local governments – more bureaucratic bailout cash from the so-called “stimulus” that Congress passed last February.

Vacationing lawmakers have been called back to Washington, D.C. by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to vote on the measure, which was approved last Thursday by the U.S. Senate.  State government agencies in South Carolina would receive approximately $143.4 million if the bill is passed and signed into law by President Barack Obama – with most of that money getting dumped into the twin black holes of Medicaid and public education.

In case you’ve lost count, South Carolina has received more than $2 billion in stimulus funding over the last year-and-a-half – money that has done absolutely nothing to turn around the state’s moribund economy.

Not surprisingly, though, politicians are trotting out familiar front-line “victims” to assist them in promoting the bill – claiming that the jobs of hundreds of thousands of police officers, firefighters and teachers will be lost if the money isn’t made available.

Wait … haven’t we doubled the size of the federal budget over the last decade to $3.8 trillion?  And isn’t South Carolina’s $20.8 billion state budget also its largest ever?

Yes and yes … and yet somehow these politicians can’t find the money to keep cops on the street?

Please.

These spin tactics are demonstrably ridiculous.  In South Carolina, for example, our worst-in-the-nation public education system received a record $9.5 billion in 2009 – an 8.3 percent increase in appropriations from the previous year, which was also a record high.

Yet despite receiving record funding over the previous two years (and using portions of it to pay for a soaring “consultant” tab), the S.C. Department of Education estimates that it has eliminated 3,500 “education positions” over that same time period.  At least that’s what the agency’s spokesman told the Anderson Independent Mail last week.

Clearly tax dollars aren’t going where they are supposed to go – which seems to be government’s problem no matter what it attempts to run.

For the truth about education funding in South Carolina, click here.

Pic: via Wikipedia