Senator Gregg addresses the crowd gathered at the Portsmouth naval shipyard during the commissioning of the USS New Hampshire.
We’ve been writing on the so called “Cash for Clunkers” legislation for most of this year now.
Since it was first proposed back in January, the complicated and controversial bill has been caught between environmental and commercial factions without agreement as to what it is supposed to accomplish with as much as $4 billion in U.S. taxpayer subsidies.
Last week the House of Representatives finally passed “The Consumer Assistance to Recycle and Save (CARS) Act” and a House Conference report has sent it on to the U.S. Senate. And therein resides the problem for advocates of some sort of auto recycling incentive.
The Senate version of the bill — trimmed back to a mere $1 billion — is attached to supplemental funding legislation for our ongoing, very expensive, conflicts in Iran and Afghanistan. The supplemental funding for the war is due to be debated in the Senate shortly, maybe today, since our representatives don’t work much on Mondays or Fridays in Washington.
The timing of the Senate floor debate is unfortunate for Clunkers advocates. It comes when the alarm over our deficit spending is rising as a real political issue, which people running for office are becoming aware of — they are living off increasingly unhappy taxpayers . So no wonder various posturing is now occurring over the very deficits these politicians caused.
“The problem the President’s budget has is, as we get past this next year, year and a half of recession and we get further down the road in his budget, the budget he has sent up to us continues to dramatically increase spending, dramatically increase borrowing, and dramatically increase taxes,” said Senator Judd, a Republican from New Hampshire.
The supplemental bill is a legislative trick to fund the wars outside of the normal budgetary process. Previous versions issued since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center have run up a tab of $1 trillion. Critics say the ultimate cost of the wars will be $3 trillion. And they are increasingly unpopular with voters.
The Senate will debate this year’s $106 billion version after the House passed the bill over the objections of virtually all Republicans and several dozen anti-war Democrats. The bill has $90 billion for defense, intelligence, security costs in Iraq and Afghanistan through the rest of this fiscal year, which ends September 30th.
Judd doesn’t think Clunkers should be in the war funding bill and will move to have it taken out. He does, however, favor huge spending deficits on military matters.
“The massive spending, taxing and borrowing planned under this budget will hurt the economy both within the budget window as well as beyond it,” Judd said yesterday.
If a majority of 60 Senators don’t overrule him, once again Cash for Clunkers will be in legislative limbo.