Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“A recent Transportation Department audit of Hurricane Sandy relief funds found $95 million in questionable costs and $2.9 billion in unspent money.”
https://reason.com/2025/11/25/taxpayers-still-paying-for-hurricane-sandy-relief-mismanagement-13-years-later-new-report-finds/
The real problem isn’t deficits, It’s Neoliberalism“ Top Economist warns
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ2puKiKBdE
“The bipartisan deal to end the funding lapse includes a long-term agreement on just three of the dozen bills lawmakers need to finish each year to keep cash flowing to federal programs. And those three measures are some of the easiest to rally around — including money for veterans programs, food aid, assistance for farmers and the operations of Congress itself.
Together, they represent only about 10 percent of the roughly $1.8 trillion Congress doles out each year to federal agencies. Under the deal, everything else is funded on a temporary basis through Jan. 30 at levels first set by Congress in March 2024, when Joe Biden was president.
That leaves behind major open decisions about the vast majority of discretionary dollars — including for the military and public health programs — along with the stickiest policy issues. It doesn’t help that House and Senate leaders still haven’t agreed on an overall total for fiscal 2026 spending, amid GOP divisions over how deeply to cut.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/13/shutdown-appropriations-january-30-00649414
“Over the last decade, roughly one in every 10 dollars of budget authority has worn an emergency tag.
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On paper, the Office of Management and Budget has a five-part test for emergency spending: It should be necessary, sudden, urgent, unforeseen, and not permanent. Congress rarely forces itself to demonstrate, item by item, that all five prongs are met. There’s no neutral referee. Once “designated as an emergency” appears in the bill and the president concurs, the amounts are exempt from caps and PAYGO scorecards.
And because this budget label is separate from more specific “national emergency” declarations under statutes like the Stafford Act or the National Emergencies Act, it quietly turns into a vehicle for funding routine projects. It’s such a procedural magic word that fiscal guardrails all but disappear.
Finally, even when a real crisis exists, so too does opportunism. Emergency bills move fast, face weak scrutiny, and become irresistible means for unrelated projects or those that Congress would never approve otherwise. This dynamic marred the 2012-13 Hurricane Sandy package and has recurred in other disaster bills, not because relief is illegitimate but because speed plus political cover invites provisions that would die in regular order.
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The stakes of the abuse of emergency labelling are no longer abstract. Interest costs on debt that results from the extra spending are crowding out core functions of government. Americans are hammered with “emergency” tariff costs. The next true crisis will arrive with less room to maneuver if we keep burning credibility on manufactured ones.
A republic that treats emergencies as a governing philosophy is a republic that lives without its safeguards. We must put the word back in its place: as one describing something rare, reviewable, temporary, and paid for.”
https://reason.com/2025/11/06/emergency-has-become-washingtons-favorite-loophole-its-cost-taxpayers-15-trillion/
“A federal judge in Rhode Island ordered the Trump administration to release full funding for November food stamps by Friday.
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“Last weekend, SNAP benefits lapsed for the first time in our nation’s history. This is a problem that could have and should have been avoided,””
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/06/judge-orders-trump-administration-to-pay-full-snap-benefits-00640627
“Don’t be fooled: The debt explosion is not driven by waste, fraud, or foreign aid. Nor is it the result of a lack of revenue. It’s the direct result of reckless promises to retirees, the cost of health care, and an unwillingness to pay the bills honestly. For most of American history, debt fell when wars ended and peace returned. Since 1980, we’ve managed the opposite: peace without prudence and prosperity without restraint.”
https://reason.com/2025/10/30/americas-30-trillion-publicly-held-debt-is-42-times-larger-than-it-was-in-1980/
Some leaders and elected representatives of the Tea Party really believed in their supposed motivations about government spending, debt, and pork. But for the most part, the Tea Party was a big, damn lie. If all those Tea Partiers really cared about such things, they would be protesting and organizing just as hard against Trump right now.
https://reason.com/podcast/2025/10/22/what-happened-to-the-republican-party/
ICE’s Spending on Weaponry Is Up More Than 600 Percent Over Last Year
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/10/ice-spending-small-arms-weapons-chemical-munitions-increased-700-percent-2025/
“President Donald Trump returned to the White House with a promise to slash spending by trillions of dollars and balance the federal budget.
But, as the first fiscal year of his second term came to a close, progress had not been made on either of those goals.
Despite the high-profile efforts of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the 2025 federal fiscal year ended with the federal government having spent more money than it did in the previous fiscal year, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported
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The CBO’s end-of-year report helpfully spells out which parts of the federal budget saw the biggest year-over-year spending increases. Overwhelmingly, and unsurprisingly, the biggest increases were for the so-called entitlement programs: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. For those three programs, spending increased by a combined $245 billion.
Other big spending increases were recorded by the Pentagon ($38 billion) and the Department of Veterans Affairs ($41 billion), where the increase was driven by the rising cost of health care facilities. Interest payments on the national debt rose by $80 billion compared to the previous fiscal year’s totals.
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the CBO’s report serves to underline the same fiscal reality that plagued the DOGE project: Cutting silly government contracts and foreign aid might be a worthwhile effort, but that won’t make a dent in the budget deficit. Any serious effort at fiscal reform has to focus on the areas of the budget that are growing year over year—which, realistically, means looking at entitlement programs.
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There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical that anything will change in the next three years. For one, Trump’s track record after nearly five years as president does not suggest he cares very much about actually cutting spending. The coming years will also bring greater headwinds to any attempts at reducing the deficit. That’s due in part to the expected increases in entitlement spending, as well as the fiscal effects of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which extended and expanded the 2017 tax cuts in ways that will likely add to the deficit.”
https://reason.com/2025/10/10/after-all-those-doge-cuts-federal-spending-still-increased-by-300-billion/?nab=1
The Navy said they didn’t want any more littoral combat ships because they sucked, but Congress spent a bunch more money building more of them due to district politics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZT7TWwMj8OQ