. . . total federal spending has . . . grown 67 percent since the Republican revolution of 1994 — from $1.5 trillion in 1995 to almost $2.5 trillion last year . . .
Over the last 10 years discretionary spending — the 40 percent of the budget the Congress and the president control — has increased 65 percent. Since Mr. Bush became president, it has jumped 49 percent . . .
Pork-barrel projects in the federal budget grew from 1,439 in fiscal 1995 to 13,997 in fiscal 2005 . . .
The negative publicity that pork barrel spending started getting post-Katrina has seemed to have some effect. Just one problem. Although the number of earmarks in this year’s budget is smaller than last year’s, discretionary spending has grown.
. . . lawmakers cut back on the number of earmarks, from 9,963 in 11 appropriations bills, a 29 percent decrease over last year’s 13,997. That is highly commendable, right? But wait. The $29 billion spent on the reduced number of pork projects actually was a 6.2 percent increase over the $27.3 billion spent the previous year.
There’s been a lot of speculation about how political bloggers are burning out. A couple of weeks ago, Wretcherd commented on it on his blog, The Belmont Club:
My own theory is that all the old divisions so sharply erected between September 11, 2001 and April, 2003 have been slowly eroded by the uncertainties of the world. The Left and the Right have seen their champions turn out to be all too human, and are confounded . . . The old play is ending and yet the new one has not yet begun. And this bothers abstract intellectuals far more than it does the men in the field. A soldier can write with perfect conviction that “the world was a slightly better place every time I pulled the trigger” because he lives in a world of specificity, but the agonized thinker can find no such comfort in cold abstractions; abstractions now in need of repair under the weight of experience.
Wretcherd is thinking more broadly than pork barrel spending, but on my personal political tally sheet, it counts for a lot. Republicans are supposed to practice fiscal restraint. They’ve failed. If their constituents are succumbing to malaise, that’s where the blame lies.
Nobody admires a sell-out.
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