All Intensive Purposes

Over at Tapped, Sam Rosenfeld heralds the survival of Community Development Block Grants in the face of administration efforts to consolidate and change fundamentally the program:

This is news to be cheered, though I can’t resist using it to point out for the trillionth time how truly pathetic the modern GOP has become on these budget issues, from a small-government conservative's perspective. Discretionary spending on poverty is supposed to be the first casualty of any garden-variety starve-the-beast gambit, and on the margins one could say that this has been the case in the past few years. But if a unified Republican government running enormous deficits can’t manage to make even a dent in a program targeted at impoverished neighborhoods and their predominantly Democratic municipal governments, exactly how seriously should we take that party’s supposed governing philosophy?

Two questions:

(1) Mark Schmitt has described the budgeteering trick of pretending to cut a popular program that you know Congress will restore, allowing the administration to claim credit for trying to ax it and Congress to claim credit for saving it. Is this what happened here?

(2) I have seen data suggesting that the Republican Congress has shifted the balance of federal spending towards GOP congressional districts, far out of proportion to the minor imbalance favoring Democrats before 1994 (sorry, no link just now). It wouldn't surprise me if CDBG grants now go disproportionately to GOP areas, creating a constituency to save them (see (1) above). Anyone know if that's true.

Remember, these Republicans are not about cutting government -- they're about looting the government for their own. Accusing them of hypocrisy on the "cutting government" thing is getting old. Who cares about any hypocrisy, or taking their philosophy seriously? Stick to pointing out that they're all about looting the government.