Veronique de Rugy
2008-05-21 07:00:00.0
Current rank: Not ranked

WASHINGTON -

What if you decided to fund financial emergencies with your credit card and worry about the bill later? You couldn’t plan for your radiator to burst, so you couldn’t budget for it — charge it. Soon it might seem that dinner out when you didn’t have time to cook was also an emergency. Eventually you might think the mortgage bill seemed like a good candidate for the credit card, too.

Financial habits like that are a disaster waiting to happen. But Congress and the president are doing exactly that with emergency supplemental spending bills. Supplementals were created for funding unforeseen, temporary emergencies. For the past six years, they’ve funded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at a cost of almost $1 trillion. Furthermore, this is the first war in U.S. history funded entirely through supplementals. Supplemental spending lets lawmakers avoid tough choices because it doesn’t figure into deficit calculations. There is little incentive to contain war costs if they don’t affect the bottom line.

Supplementals are also pork magnets because they lack oversight. A supplemental bill passed last June contained $24 billion in domestic spending, including $120 million for the shrimp and menhaden fishing industries, $283 million for the Milk Income Loss Contract program and $1 billion for avian flu — which are no more emergencies than a mortgage bill.

Congress is currently considering a $193 billion emergency supplemental — the largest in U.S. history.

But the real emergency is the fact that the president and Congress are seriously abusing supplemental spending.

Read more at mercatus.org/Publications/pubID.4500,cfilter.0/pub_detail.asp