The WSJ claims that: Lobbyists Raise Stimulus Price Tag”
Florida citrus growers, California wine growers and a range of agricultural interests are pushing a tiny change that would allow farmers to more quickly depreciate new fields. High-tech and pharmaceutical companies want to save billions in taxes by including a plan that would allow them to bring overseas profits back home at lower tax rates. Labor unions are pressing Congress to make sure that new government funding for green technology results in jobs with good pay and benefits for workers….
And so on. Yesterday, for instance, we learned that $90 million of the stimulus is to go to ACORN for more voter fraud campaigns. But none of this theft could go on without the active participation of the whores we elect and send to Washington. Last heard, few lobbyists carry guns – they can only bribe, and a politician retains the power, rarely exercised, to decline a bribe. Not that they want to. The man who seems most admired in D.C. today, judging from the praise heaped on him by the White House and his fellow Democrats, is Tom Daschle, who lost his senate seat just four years ago and left the Senate a broken man, penniless after his years of service to this country. He immediately skirted the rules forbidding lobbying by ex-senators and started racking up $5,000,000 a year lobbying on behalf of drug companies, health organizations and anyone else who would line his pockets. He didn’t pay taxes on that income because he doesn’t like paying taxes, unlike those of us who joyfully write our own checks to the IRS as an exercise in patriotic duty. So today he’ll be put in charge of “supervising” his former whoremasters and the rest of Congress will get busy heeding the whims of lobbyists and hoping to get as rich as Tom.
That’s change they can all believe in.
For What It's Worth 