I don't mean to ruin Nadezhda's silver lining, but ...

We're Congressional Republicans are spending $2,000,000 taxpayer dollars so that George W. Bush can have a Presidential Yacht?

(Edited: credit where credit is due)

Oh, it was a fine day on Capitol Hill. And clearly too much to expect that the session would end without providing at least several handfuls more of compelling reasons for Congressional reform.

The Omnibus budget bill got caught up in a complicated little wrinkle, for all the world to see on CSPAN. Seems someone (turns out a House Republican) unbeknownst to certainly the Democrats and, according to Sen Stevens, unbeknownst to the Senate Republicans as well, tried to slip a little passage in the volumnious text.

It would have given the Chairmen of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees or their "agents" the power to review any American's tax return with no restrictions whatsoever. Josh Marshall has many of the lovely specifics, but here's the core:

Specifically, none of the privacy law restrictions -- or the criminal and civil penalties tied to them -- would apply when the Chair or anybody he or she designates as his or her "agent" looked at your tax return.
[...]
Sen. Stevens of Alaska, Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, originally blamed the provision on a 'staffer'. But later, according to the AP, Sen. Frist and "congressional aides" said it was inserted at the behest of Rep. Istook [R, Ok., Chair, House Transportation Sub-Committee of Appropriations Committee].
[...]
At the last minute, Senate Democrats caught the language (keep in mind these omnibus bills can be like phone books), protested and the Republicans beat a hasty retreat. Some of it is discussed in this AP article at MSNBC, though they lamely call it a "tax-disclosure gaffe."

The Republicans are acting like it was all an innocent mistake. And it seems clear that there are Republican senators who didn't know anytihng about it and are pissed. But clearly this was no accident, unless provisions have started to write themselves.

The Kossacks had a field day, live blogging the Senate floor appearances of outraged Democrats. The Republicans must be glad they're leaving town for Thanksgiving right about now.

Courtesy the Washington Post, another installment in the saga of the shift in the balance of economic risk away from capital and toward labor. This time brought to us by the Pension Benefits Guaranty Corporation.

A significant portion of the skyrocketing deficits is due to declared or likely-to-be bankruptcies in the airlines and steel industries. Deregulation of airlines may have expanded services and reduced the price of flying for us as consumers, but it looks like we may be picking up some of the tab as taxpayers.

Oh, and perhaps we should consider this little item when we're figuring out how to fund the transition cost of privatizing part of Social Security. Although it must be admitted, $20+ billion is easy to overlook when you're talking in fractions of a trillion.

Struggling under a cascade of bankruptcy filings in the airline and steel industries, the government's pension insurance agency said yesterday that its deficit has more than doubled in the past year -- to $23.3 billion.

The figure is so large that an overhaul of the way traditional pensions are funded and insured has become essential, several experts said. Pensions of about 44 million workers and retirees are insured by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.
[...]
"The bottom line seems to be that there really is a PBGC crisis, though to date neither Congress nor the [Bush] administration has been treating it as such," said Dallas L. Salisbury, who heads the Employer Benefit Research Institute in the District.

There are three basic ways that the deficit can be made up: (1) revaluation of assets through a bull market (combined with some "aggressive" portfolio management); (2) increasing revenues through larger premium payments from employers; and (3) taxpayers making up the difference.

Door Number 1 isn't what you'd want to bet the farm on, as hopefully someone learned in 2000.   more »