Getting Totally Wasted

Boy do Americans love to waste money in the government spending! It is fascinating to watch conservatives rail against “entitlements” but are addicted to the most expensive, wasteful spending in the categories than have generated the biggest deficits in decades. So while in the future I will continue to challenge our proclivity to spend way too much on “defense” and wage war first and ask questions later – generating the $4-6 trillion (depending on how you calculate direct costs, deficit interest, military benefits related and pension costs) mostly unfunded costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars started during a GOP administration – I’d like to drill down on some local habits of extreme and obvious waste.

Let’s start with the need of conservative Christian legislators who incur millions of dollars in taxpayer money to legislate laws they know will not pass constitutional muster. Senior Republicans in North Carolina have basically proposed a law that allows states to ignore federal constitutional mandates they don’t want to follow and to establish Christianity as the official state religion.

The bill, which fortunately didn’t pass, reads: “SECTION 1. The North Carolina General Assembly asserts that the Constitution of the United States of America does not prohibit states or their subsidiaries from making laws respecting an establishment of religion. SECTION 2. The North Carolina General Assembly does not recognize federal court rulings which prohibit and otherwise regulate the State of North Carolina, its public schools, or any political subdivisions of the State from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.” But damn (word carefully chosen to express emotion), they so wanted it to pass, even though it would have gone down in flames after a bunch of lucky and well-paid lawyers would have fought the good fight on behalf of North Carolina.

Arkansas and North Dakota have decided that they want to foot the litigation bills – millions of dollars – to challenge Roe vs Wade by adopting new statutes banning abortions after, respectively, 12 and 6 weeks. They join with too many Republican legislators who tend to be very “aggressive; they don’t accept the Roe v. Wade decision as law and don’t use it as a framework for passing legislation. They tend to be more ideological and less pragmatic, thinking about the best ways to restrict abortion regardless of whether they’ll be upheld by the Supreme Court… These include bills to declare life as beginning at conception or, in the cases of Arkansas and North Dakota, abortion bans that clearly conflict with Roe’s protection of elective, first trimester pregnancies.” Washington Post, March 15^th. Spend that taxpayer money on a fruitless appeal!

With the tilt of voting power clearly favoring rural constituencies through aggressive redistricting (a state prerogative) and the result of Ben Franklin’s “New Jersey compromise” – ensuring rural states with more land and fewer voters would have equal senatorial power with more populous trading/manufacturing states – perhaps we are witnessing the dying gasps of a rural white society falling from power. Demographics will eventually overwhelm them, even with the above “tilt,” as the growing “majority of minorities” with clearly modern/urban sensibilities make their mark. But conservative waste continues on a massive scale.

Look at our criminal justice system, where the draw of money required to feed traditional and conservative harsh penalties is unsustainable. There are too many people in prison under some of the longest sentences on earth. We have 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the incarcerated inmates. Take the cost of the death penalty as another example of excess and waste. California is reflective of the costs across the entire United States “A report of the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice… [u]sing conservative rough projections… estimates the annual costs of the present (death penalty) system to be $137 million per year…The cost of a system which imposes a maximum penalty of lifetime incarceration instead of the death penalty would be $11.5 million per year.” Deathpenaltyinfo.org.

We also often punish accomplices and accessories substantially more harshly than most other modern nations. Many times the less culpable inmates get harsher sentence than the master perpetrators (because they don’t “bargain,” don’t “give up” some information on another case to the prosecutor, or they are not as well represented). “Such cases, in which a defendant with lesser culpability draws the harshest sentence, are not uncommon in Arizona, and elsewhere around the country. Of the six inmates executed in this state last year, four were equally or less culpable than co-defendants implicated in the same crimes, according to Dale A. Baich, the supervisor of the capital habeas unit in the federal public defender’s office, which handles appeals of capital cases in federal court. (Prison records show that three of those four co-defendants have been released.)

“In many of the 32 other states that carry the death penalty, similar stories unfold as prosecutors, when deciding whom to charge, weigh the cost of mounting a capital trial, which can reach $1 million, against the likelihood of a conviction…’ In an ideal world, the prosecution would have ironclad proof against all the co-defendants to be able to pick the worst for the death penalty, but we have an inequitable system, a bargaining system,’ said Richard Dieter, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, which tracks the number of executions across the country. ‘If you give the prosecution some help,’ Mr. Dieter said of defendants in such cases, ‘you’ll get something out of it.’” New York Times, April 5^th. So we have an expensive and totally unfair system justice that does nothing more to protect the public than an efficient, fairly administered process that traditional conservatives will not even entertain.

So when I see the Tea Party-driven GOP in the House talking about cutting budgets and saving costs, I wonder why they cannot see how they have been the perpetrators of the greatest deficits, the most intolerable waste in this nation’s modern history. If we are going to cut budgets and slam incomes of the poor, disabled, elderly and retired, trashing our educational system and fail to repair our infrastructure, EVERYTHING HAS TO BE ON THE BUDGET-SLASHING TABLE!

I’m Peter Dekom, and waste is waste whether it is liberal or conservative waste!