The Federal Budget... Mmm...

What you see before you is the president's fiscal year 2008 budget request. Granted, this may be a bit obsolete, since Congress recently passed the 2008 budget, and if it hasn't been signed yet it will be soon because the president isn't expected to veto it. Anyway, since I couldn't find the approved budget, this will do for now for big picture analysis.

The budget you see here actually only includes discretionary spending, which is less than 40% of the total budget. Non discretionary spending includes Medicare, Medicaid and social security. I have posted this mostly for any of my libertarian friends who might read my blog. There is a lot of talk about how much federal taxes are and I think that talk should be connected to knowledge of how much each government service costs. On the far right column is percentages of the total discretionary budget.

To be honest, this seems to pose more questions than it answers. But it is a good starting point to understanding where your federal dollars go and how much you could actually expect back if you cut certain programs (my analysis is that you would not get much back) or whether we could increase spending in certain areas. I plan to talk more about the details in the future, so stay tuned. If you want more detail, you can go here and get agency level detail.

Support for the War

I posted a while ago about Hillary Clinton's support for the Iraq War and how her justification seemed to make sense. This NY Times article muddies the water a little. Since I wasn't paying attention as much then as I am now, I find it hard to really understand how the debate played out - whether the resolution was a threat to Saddam or whether people should have reasonable expected Bush to use it to go to war. I don't have the energy right now to argue this through. But read the article, it is brief but interesting.

Praise for LBJ?

I feel a little bad that I have been bashing Hillary a lot lately. But it seems like I keep getting more reasons to. Most recently, she made the following comment, "Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done."

There is so much that enrages me about this statement. First, it has long bothered me when people, usually presidential biographers but now Hillary too, give the credit for advances in the civil rights movement to Eisenhower, Kennedy, or Johnson. While it is true we should be thankful that they did the little things they did, the civil rights movement was achieved not because of them, but because of groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, NAACP, and Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, among others. Neither Johnson nor Kennedy were marching on Washington, working in the deep south for African-American voter registration, or boycotting buses and lunch counters that wouldn't serve blacks.

Furthermore, Johnson in particular got behind the movement when there was already the momentum for it. The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act, arguably more important, was passed in 1965. This was nearly ten years after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, kicked off after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat.

I know there are political science theories about "pressure cookers" and acting at just the right time, but personally, I think they are bunk. It is a way of celebrating someone who did nothing other than wait until there was popular support. Johnson may have worked hard in 1964 and 1965 for the bills to be passed, but the issue already had popular support - especially among northern whites who were outraged by footage of police attacking non-violent protesters in the south. He didn't use his position as Majority Leader of the Senate in the late 50's for these issues. Because of this, he doesn't deserve the credit for the Civil Rights Act.

This is about more than just one seemingly inappropriate comment though. I think it says something about the Clintons that they would celebrate Johnson's role in the Civil Rights movement. Bill Clinton, as president, seemed to rarely use his control over the agenda to promote big issues that didn't already have strong national support. Two major examples of this are Rwanda and the Balkans - and Somalia too for that matter (yes, it seems that I will never forgive President Clinton for his poor choices in the face of genocide). And Hillary has the same reputation. The point is, I don't want a leader who will be good at recognizing an issue whose time has come. I want a leader that will recognize something like civil rights and fight for it until others are on board. Hillary can't be that person if she is willing to make a comment like the one above.