It’s gratifying to see others espouse the positions I’ve been arguing here for some time. That’s the case with this Bloomberg editorial, proposing the return of “earmarks”:
Earmarking got a bad rap over the years, and not entirely without reason. Total spending on such measures rose from less than $3 billion in 1991 to $29 billion at its peak in 2006. Tales of misspent funds proliferated. Favors were exchanged. Crimes were committed. You might recall a $223 million set-aside for connecting a remote Alaskan town to a yet more remote island. An uproar over this “bridge to nowhere†was one reason both parties suspended earmarks altogether in 2011.
In fact, though, such boondoggles were the exception. Over the years, lawmakers generally requested small-dollar earmarks to solve local problems or fund workaday projects. The process often made Congress more responsive to regional needs and legislators more attentive to what they were passing. Because earmarks merely directed funds that were already being appropriated, moreover, they required no new spending and added nothing to budget deficits.
More important, they created incentives for compromise. A lawmaker looking to advance a general-interest bill could sweeten the pot by funding local initiatives favored by an opposition member. This gave the minority an interest in governing, encouraged bipartisanship, and helped resolve collective-action problems. Although unlovely, it was often quite consequential: Both George W. Bush’s Medicare expansion and Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act relied on earmarks (broadly defined) for passage.
Eliminating earmarks was seen as a way of cleaning up government and reducing spending. Instead it turned out to be a formula for making it difficult to pass legislation. That is all too frequently the case with such reforms. Take the present civil service system. Please.
As Yogi Berra put it in theory there’s no difference between practice and theory but in practice there is.
Reforms. Yeah, reforms. The Family had a lot of reforms…..
“I have grave concern that the (FISA) court was defrauded intentionally … There was some type of agenda, an inappropriate agenda beyond an objective intelligence or criminal investigation,” said Kevin Brock, a retired FBI assistant director for Intelligence who helped implement most of the intelligence and informant rules the FBI uses today.
“I struggle to find any other explanation,” Brock told the John Solomon Reports podcast. “Any other explanation just doesn’t pass the smell test. I mean, the glaring — the Steele dossier, for an experienced counterintelligence agent in the field, was blinking red lights Russian disinformation campaign, and yet you’re going to have the highest levels of the FBI executives use that to create an investigation?”
Ya don’t say.
I think the FBI should be discontinued. We don’t need or want a Stasi. And federal agencies have their own law enforcement wings these days. It’s redundant for law enforcement.
“FBI should be discontinued”
Along with the IRS. That kind of thinking is going to resonate with a lot of people, but politically it won’t have legs. For the same reason Trump was stymied, careerists.
The first objective of any organization, is survival.
And the FBI has plenty of tools at their disposal.
The problem is that Trump and his people were also in on the cover up. They investigated for 4 years and never found anything. The IRS has already been neutered. They are much more likely now to ignore the wealthy who are hiding money in offshore accounts and dont have the resources to investigate much anymore. They do the time and money to investigate poor people as they can afford lawyers to fight back.
Steve
Yes, the “Trump people,†especially those, who we know, overwhelmingly populate the media, were in on it. Snicker
https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/fbis-cozy-relations-reporters-often-backfired-ending