GOP Defeat of Stimulus Plan
The utter hypocrisy of Senate Republicans who filibustered President Clinton’s stimulus package is startling. Notwithstanding that the same senators supported almost identical measures when proposed during the Reagan and Bush administrations--and without offsetting spending reductions--they now label the spending measures as pork-barrel waste.
Rural senators like Bob Dole (R-Kan.) and Trent Lott (R-Miss.) consider it wasteful to send their states’ tax dollars to urban areas to provide summer jobs and recreational facilities for underprivileged inner-city youths. Yet, ironically, they unflinchingly defend wasteful farm subsidies and set-aside programs that artificially inflate farm prices and pay farmers to leave their land fallow--programs that are anathema to the market economics we preach to our international trading partners and that have turned the once proud American farmer into a welfare recipient. Apparently the only good pork to Dole and Lott and other “conservative” rural senators is the kind that lives on the farm.
STEVE TURNBULL
Los Angeles
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