"Unfiltered" look at Budget Resolution

I found myself interested this week in the Federal budget. The House of Representatives Budget Committee passed a budget resolution for 2007. Now both the House and Senate are trying to reconcile the details in order to pass a unified piece of legislation to the President for his approval and signing. I read the news stories and saw the statistics and thought I would do some research. I wanted to make some distinctions between what was fact and what was propaganda. After a couple hours of reading and searching I came to the conclusion that I had a very powerful headache. It’s no wonder we all take the over generalized talking points that we see on the news as gospel. Most of us don’t have the time to look over the shoulder of our elected representatives. The feeling is that they can’t be trusted, but we have no time for electoral babysitting. This job of government oversight was once trusted to the journalistic community. However, with the drum of “bias” being endlessly beaten by both sides we have lost confidence in the motivations of those that would inform us. This makes the politician as happy as mice in a house without a cat. They are free to eat all the cheese, or in this case pork, as they want.

I decided to go to the “unfiltered” source www.house.gov/budget/ to see if I could make my own determinations. Was this a good budget or not? A copy of the budget proposal is available here with 159 pages of economic figures and legal jargon that was the beginning of my headache. Next I looked at the 44 pages of Legislative Text that made less sense than the first bit of reading. Thankfully there was a video. The budget presentations of both Republicans and Democrats, unedited and “unfiltered”. First the Republican chairman Jim Nussle spoke at length on the strength and sensibility of this proposed budget. Everything’s great, it turns out. The economy is humming along and thanks to Republican leadership next year will be even better than the last. At least that was his general argument as I heard it. His statement went on like this for an excess of 20 minutes, then it was ranking Democrat John Spratt’s turn to critique the proposed resolution. Turns out everything is terrible and out of control. This budget is pushing us one step closer to national bankruptcy while ignoring the countries real priorities. This was his general argument as I heard it. It went on for another 20 minutes. So much for “unfiltered” answers. We need well-informed journalism to help guide us through the mountains of details that comes with every issue. Our job is to find, search out if we have to, journalist we believe we can trust.. The responsibility is on our shoulders to ensure that there will be consequences when we are lied to. No matter if it is by the journalist or politician. When I was done I turned off my computer, stopped taking notes and turned on the TV. I let Elizabeth Vargas tell me all about Pandas in China and some noble “Person of the Week“. I had no absolute answers but at least my headache was going away.