The current debate within the Republican party is how to pay for Hurricane Katrina. Three options are spending cuts, tax increases and borrowing.
Spending cuts, especially of pork barrel projects like the bridge to nowhere in Alaska, are an appealing option. However, House Majority leader Tom DeLay (TX-22) claims that federal spending has been cut to the bone. On the other hand Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) says there should be cuts in outlays across the board. The House Republican Study Committee has also released a list of spending cuts with the the beginning of “Operation Offset.”
According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) said, “This really is the time for the president to use the bully pulpit to ask the American people to sacrifice, and to ask the leaders of the Congress to set (budget) priorities in a different way than we are setting them now so that we don’t pass this debt on to future generations.” Sen. Graham suggested that there were many ways to cut the spending in order to offset the cost of Katrina. The Taxpayers for Common Sense suggest several cuts that congress could make in the budget to offset Katrina’s budget.
Some suggest using a temporary sales tax to offset the cost of hurricane relief. Graham says that everything from spending to taxes should be considered in determining how to pay for the disaster. I think this is correct, however, I believe that taxes, and even more so, borrowing which would explode the debt further should be last resorts after all pork-barrel projects are cut from the budget. This is especially true for the transportation and energy legislation passed this summer.
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