Not Good!

Title: Minimum wage, war top Democrats' plans
Source: Yahoo!

WASHINGTON - Democrats say they will burst out of a 12-year exile with a bang if they win control of Congress in two weeks. They promise to quickly pass a minimum wage increase at home and to reduce the U.S. war role in Iraq.

Minimum wage is the biggest economic farce ever, especially since union wages are tied to the minimum wage. Raising the minimum wage has never been good for the economy. Rising wages drive up prices by increasing production costs. The increase in wages, however, puts the consumer in a higher tax bracket, effectively reducing his buy power. It is better to increase wages by increasing competition. Competition is increased by improving the business climate, for example through tax cuts. But tax cuts are bad for the national debt, if not accompanied by spending cuts. A high national debt, I believe, devalues the money supply by making government bonds less attractive.
I have to keep saying it: The federal government needs to get out of the welfare and pension business. It costs to much for help for the poor to be centally managed in Washington. I need to check, also, sometime on the amount of pork included in each welfare bill. I can imagine it must be pretty high, I'll be surprised if it's not.
Pork is another area that costs the taxpayer billions of dollars every year. We need a man in the white house who would, without exception, automatically veto any bill containing pork that has nothing to do with the bill itself.
Example: USA Today, 11/22/2004. Budget bill has $15.8B in extras

A look at the fine print in the legislation, however, reveals more than 11,000 "earmarks" that add up to about $15.8 billion, or about 4% of the overall spending. Earmarks are money set aside for special projects. These include $300,000 for a parking garage in Auburn, Maine, $8 million to rehabilitate a "historic cafeteria building" in Oregon's Crater Lake National Park and $1.1 million for research into the development of baby food and other products made from salmon.

What business has the federal government building a parking garage in Auburn, Maine, or anywhere else for that matter. $8 million to rehab a cafe in Oregon? Isn't that the responsibility of the owner of the cafeteria, or at least the Oregon park servcie? And the 1.1 mill for research into salmon ought to be paid by the people raising the fish, the one's, in fact, making profit from it. Research made on government grants has been shown to be mostly frivolous projects that no sensible business man will finance.

That was 2004! What's going on now?

House Votes To Disclose Earmarks

Rule Change Defers Broad Lobby Reform

By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum

Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 15, 2006; Page A01

The House voted yesterday to shed more light on narrow-interest tax and spending legislation called earmarks, an incremental step toward openness that ended the prospect for a more sweeping overhaul of federal lobbying laws this year.

Disclose earmarks. Tell us, in obscure congessional journals most likely, where the pork is going. Oh Goody! Now, if we're willing to dig for it, we'll know how our money is being wasted! These earmarks, this pork barrel legislation, needs to be stopped cold, not disclosed.
From Citizens Against Government Waste's "pig book":

The guilty pleas of lobbyist Jack Abramoff and former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham illustrate how pork-barrel projects, whether used as currency for re-election or as political favors to well-connected individuals or businesses, can corrupt the political process. The historic lack of restraint in the appropriations process has helped create a projected $371 billion budget deficit in fiscal 2006 and a national debt of $8.5 trillion. Whether the lobbying scandal and the outrage of taxpayers over “bridges to nowhere” will force Congress to cut the pork remains to be seen.

and:

This year, there was good news and bad news. For fiscal 2006, appropriators stuffed 9,963 projects into the 11 appropriations bills, a 29 percent decrease over last year’s total of 13,997. Despite the reduction in the number of earmarks, Congress porked out at record dollar levels with $29 billion in pork for 2006, or 6.2 percent more than last year’s total of $27.3 billion. In fact, the total cost of pork has increased by 29 percent since fiscal 2003. Total pork identified by CAGW since 1991 adds up to $241 billion.

Eliminating pork completely would be a step in the right direction in settling the national debt and cutting the deficit.

Those are my views right now, but I am researching this further, so there could be some changes coming.