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Show The Politics of Spending Money is a strange thing: Especially in the hands of the United States government. Testimony to that effect surfaces sur-faces just about every time Republicans and Democrats begin hurling the brickbats of "irresponsibility" and "deficit" at each other. Just where is the economy and why? The politics ' of government spending need to be cleared up. The Democrats in control of Congress seem to hold the decisive edge in the spending fiasco. They continually increase in-crease the budgets and allotments allot-ments of government agencies after the administration asks for strict ceilings to be maintained. main-tained. It seems that in order to maintain a liberal political image, one must also be liberal with the taxpayer's pocketbook. The number of park-barrel projects whose source is the Democratic Party in the South particularly is astounding. The Democrats spend to get elected and to mend the home fences. But what is their second most repeated complaint after the war in Vietnam all about? It's the state of economy; a state they helped create. All of this criticism does not mean the Nixon Administration is blameless. They are far from consistent. The defense budget is a prime example. It never gets cut, but rather it receives additional money for trying to create a volunteer army, which will alleviate the waste a draft army made. Cost over-runs on defense contracts are a standard practice, which the Administration, Ad-ministration, in its battle against waste, continually ignores. Indeed, it took Jack Anderson or someone to reveal that defense over-runs last year amounted to two or three billion dollars. The Nixon Administration is ready to attack Congress for waste, but ill-prepared to clean up the White House kitchen. Perhaps the attack itself and its publicity is of paramount importance. The President has the power to veto spending bills, but the adverse publicity associated with such an anti-progressive anti-progressive stance outweighs the re-election benefits of controlling spending. The politics of spending works like this, then: The politician votes for spending and then manages to pass the blame along to another sector. Hence he is elected and has turned the political trick of appearing liberal on spending and conservative on the economy. This sort of fraud must be checked. We don't really have much input to the President and Administration, but we have great input to local representatives. represen-tatives. Senators Bennett and Moss, Congressmen Lloyd and McKay, how have you been voting on spending bills? |