{"id":2677,"date":"2006-11-27T13:27:10","date_gmt":"2006-11-27T13:27:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zmetro.com\/?p=2677"},"modified":"2006-11-27T13:27:10","modified_gmt":"2006-11-27T13:27:10","slug":"two_senators_st","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=2677","title":{"rendered":"Two Senators Stop Late 2006 Earmark Stuffed Spending Bills"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.opinionjournal.com\/diary\/?id=110009304\">John Fund<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>Sens. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Jim DeMint of South Carolina have decided to take a stand against overspending by objecting to the nearly 10,000 earmarks, or member-sponsored pork projects, larded throughout the spending bills Congress is currently considering.<\/p>\n<p>Their obstinacy has convinced the leadership of the departing Republican Congress that they probably won&#8217;t be able to pass spending bills in next month&#8217;s short lame-duck session. Instead, they are likely to pass a stopgap &#8220;continuing resolution,&#8221; which will continue funding all programs at last year&#8217;s level until the new Democratic Congress passes its own versions of the funding bills. <\/p>\n<p>ass earmark-stuffed catchall spending bills could save taxpayers a cool $17 billion. All 10,000 earmarks in the pending bills will expire if they aren&#8217;t passed by the end of the year.<br \/><Br><br \/>\nOverall federal spending has gone up by 49% since 2001, but you wouldn&#8217;t know it from the anguished cries of those who regard ever-higher spending as some sort of birthright. <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Useful timing, given the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2006\/11\/23\/business\/worldbusiness\/23trip.html?ex=1321938000&amp;en=7076d0ae6ce84ad8&amp;ei=5090&amp;partner=rssuserland&amp;emc=rss\">upcoming Treasury\/Fed trip to China<\/a> to talk about exchange rates and China&#8217;s extensive dollar reserves (movement away from dollar reserves could be a real problem for the United States).  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.madisonblogs.com\/cgi-bin\/mt\/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=1&amp;search=earmarks\">Much more on earmarks<\/a>, including local commentary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>John Fund: Sens. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Jim DeMint of South Carolina have decided to take a stand against overspending by objecting to the nearly 10,000 earmarks, or member-sponsored pork projects, larded throughout the spending bills Congress is currently considering. Their obstinacy has convinced the leadership of the departing Republican Congress that they probably [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2677"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2677"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2677\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}