Robin SmithIn reading Sen. Lamar Alexander’s press release titled “Lack of Funding for Chickamauga Lock Shows Obama Administration’s ‘Failure to Set Priorities'” last week, the frustration was obvious.
After years of work with the Army Corps of Engineers, addressing the funding from the Inland Waterways Trust — a trust in the U.S. Treasury that collects taxes on commercial diesel traffic — and crafting an agreement with the barge industry to foot a diesel tax increase, Alexander’s office was seeing work pay off that had been in progress since 2003 about the critical Chickamauga Lock construction.
President Barack Obama’s budget had no mention of funding for the Chickamauga lock, despite his advocacy of infrastructure construction and the heavy lifting already done on the ground.
Obama’s budget cuts spending to the Army Corps of Engineers at a “proposed $751 million … about 14 percent below last year’s spending level.” Yet, record-setting revenues were collected by the Treasury Department and published in its January Monthly Treasury Statement at $1,046,224,000,000 for the fiscal year through January.
If the federal government is collecting a record volume of tax dollars, where is the money going? Why aren’t projects being funded that are actually ones that fall within the role of government?
According to the Department of Health and Human Services’ 2015 “Budget in Brief,” Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor, consumes $25.1 billion per month. In full-year (FY) 2012, more than one in five individuals were Medicaid patients for at least one month of that year with an estimated 65 million participants in 2014.
In a Wall Street Journal review, more than $150 million per month is spent for recipients of the “Obama Phone,” a taxpayer-funded program. According to the website, www.obamaphone.com, the program gives “20 million financially strapped Americans” a “free cell phone and minutes.”
The Housing and Urban Development Agency that was created by President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program to fight the war on poverty reports that $3.26 billion in taxpayer dollars is spent monthly for individuals receiving housing assistance.
In tax year 2013, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning organization, more than 27 million folks received the Earned Income Tax Credit. On a monthly basis, $5.34 billion is budgeted for this “low-to-moderate income assistance program” that awarded a minimum of $487 to filers with no children and up to $6,044 to filers with three or more children.
The Feb. 6, 2015, report of the U.S. Department of Agriculture shows that for the 39th straight month, more than 46 million Americans received food stamps at a cost of $5.9 billion per month to taxpayers.
And, finally, $11.8 billion is spent monthly for the ever-growing population receiving Social Security Disability Insurance. According to a National Bureau of Economic Research study published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in 2006, “DI applications to adverse labor market shocks rose sharply … particularly for less-educated workers” and “typically rise and fall with the unemployment rate,” as documented back to 1978. The study notes, “Since it seems unlikely that the onset of disability is countercyclical, this pattern could be taken as prima facie evidence that the DI system is being abused as a form of unemployment insurance.”
It’s abundantly clear to those who are intellectually honest. The U.S. government is a welfare state. Entitlement spending consumes about 65 percent of the budget.
The recent local theatrics of a funeral procession to decry lawmakers’ votes against the expansion of Tennessee’s Medicaid program are laughable and insulting. Essential, constitutional spending is being stolen by those seeking socialism instead of individual freedom and success.
It’s time for more jobs and work, and less welfare.
Robin Smith, immediate past chairwoman of the Tennessee Republican Party, is owner of Rivers Edge Alliance.