Congress Finally Unveils Spending Bill – Wingin’ It Wednesday

This week on "Wingin' It Wednesday," panelists Mike Stagg, Warren Caudle and Carol Ross joined "Mornings with Ken and Bernie" to discuss the Bayou Corne sinkhole as well as congress passing a budget compromise.

Here's what the panel had to say:

1. The Bayou Corne sinkhole in Assumption Parish has grown to over 26 acres and continues to worry residents there.  Do you think this is an isolated incident or will Louisiana face more of these sinkholes in the future?

Warren Caudle started us off:

It depends on what you call “in the future”. Yeah, probably going to face some somewhere down the road. They do need to find out what happened and take measures to make sure it doesn’t happen again. This was oilfield related. Somebody made some terrible mistakes.

Mike Stagg added:

I think there’s a high probability that stuff like this will happen again. The operating model that caused this has not changed. The Department of Natural Resources view themselves as the business outpost of the oil and gas industry in government. They’re not there to regulate, they’re there to control government’s attempts to regulate them.
Yes, we will have more problems like this and it’s because industry controls the supposed regulator and it’s not the other way around.

Carol Ross Concluded:

The most interesting thing I’ve read about this is the explanation of the topography. That Louisiana sits upon an ancient ocean. There are 127 colossal underground pillars. These are things that are all over Louisiana.
We do need to have our departments of state that are looking at this carefully, getting out of the political realm and into the scientific realm, and seeing how you can prevent this in the future.

 

2. Congressional negotiators unveiled a bipartisan, $1.1 trillion spending bill Monday night that will reverse a 1 percent cut to cost-of-living increases for disabled veterans and provide $1.525 billion in aid to Egypt, among other provisions.Is this spending bill a step in the right direction for Congress?

Carol stated:

They’re probably going to agree on this so that means one thing, the tax payers will get violated.  This thing is like Christmas in January and February because it comes with so many ornaments. There’s pork projects all over the place. It’s breaking the budget agreement of 2011. I don’t know when sanity is going to come into this thing.

Mike added:

It’s called governing. It requires compromising. Finally, after the Tea Party people have brought the Republican Party to the point of irrelevance, they agree to a budget. The fact is the debt is growing slower under Obama Administration than any other administration in the last 20 years. The fact that there is finally a budget gives some hopeful sense that maybe the Republican Party can finally get to the point of trying to govern. The work of government is governing. The art of government requires compromise.

Warren stated:

Thomas Jefferson said, “That government which governs least, governs best.”  The debt is on auto pilot. It doubles every 8 years. Let’s go back and say what it really is, spending is the crack cocaine of politics. When it comes down to it, they’re all on the same side. It’s to see how much they can spend, the only deal is, see how much it can go to their people.

Click the play button below for a full audio replay of the show:

Now it’s your turn to tell us what you think about today’s Wingin’ It Wednesday topics. Who got it right, who got it wrong, and who was way off? Let us know in the comments section.