Less than 24 hours after barely avoiding a financial fiasco, the 112th Congress has shoved aside another serious situation in a way that can only be described as dereliction of duty.
After finally reaching agreement on the raising of the national debt limit, our Senators and Representatives hurried into the skyways and onto the highways en route home for a five-week vacation.
They left behind a lot of unfinished business, including a costly mess at the Federal Aviation Administration. They left FAA funding in limbo--yet another complex issue where there is a stalemate between Democrats and Republicans.
But this is a mess that needs to be cleaned up now. It is incredibly irresponsible to delay resolution until mid September, when Congress is scheduled to return to Washington.
The last thing that lawmakers said as they rushed out of town Tuesday was that what they needed to do next was to go to work creating jobs. That sounds good, but how about saving jobs--like the ones that are being lost, at least for now, because Congress didn't hang around long enough to fully fund the FAA.
Some 4,000 FAA employees, and approximately 70,000 construction workers, are at least temporarily without employment, and income, due to Congressional inaction. At the same time, the U.S. Treasury is losing a bundle in lost airline ticket tax revenue.
Our Congressional leaders, who publicly worry over our ever increasing national debt, are busy vacationing--while adding a billion dollars plus to our national debt.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
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To shed a little more light on the issue: The Essential Air Service program of the FAA subsidizes commercial flights to about 150 rural airports nationwide at a yearly cost of nearly $200 million. Congressional critics most of them members of the Tea Party call the program the poster child for wasteful government spending. They want to cut service to 13 of these community airports at a savings of $16.5 million - a paltry sum by Washington standards - because they are within a reasonable distance of a hub airport or because their subsidies are exorbitantly high, more than $1000 per passenger. The largest is an airport in Nevada, where each passenger is subsidized to the tune of $3,700 every time he or she steps on the plane to take one of these flights.
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