Opinion: Lawmakers like to travel, but they don’t want to pay for the planes

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Congress has proved itself immune to the discomfort most people experience when they spend themselves into uncomfortable levels of debt. So much of the outrage on Capitol Hill over plans buy eight VIP jets totaling $550 million for government travel strikes me as a little hollow. Notice in the following quotes, for example, that it isn’t necessarily the House Appropriations Committee’s decision to spend such a large pile of money on planes that stirs the anger, but rather how this makes Congress look:

‘The whole thing kind of makes me sick to my stomach,’ said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D., Mo.) in an interview Sunday. ‘It is evidence that some of the cynicism about Washington is well placed -- that people get out of touch and they spend money like it’s Monopoly money.’

Several other senators said they share the concerns and will work to oppose the funding for the jets when the legislation is taken up by the Senate in September, including Sens. John McCain (R., Ariz.,) Jack Reed (D., R.I.), Richard Burr (R., N.C.), Christopher Bond (R., Mo.) and John Thune (R., S.D.).

The funding for new planes is ‘a classic example of Congress being out of touch with the realities of deficit spending,’ said Mr. Thune.

An ‘example,’ yes, but does $550 million rise to a level worthy of indignation by the spendthrifts in Washington? Recall that Congress was none too concerned about ‘the realities of deficit spending’ when it sent President Obama an omnibus appropriations bill totalling $410 billion (or about 750 times $550 million) in March -- after the president had already signed the $787 billion stimulus package. Had the $550 million been rolled into one of those spending bills, I doubt we’d be hearing much outrage from anyone.

Looking on the bright side, members of Congress have found the perfect political tool in the recession: They can ratchet up overall spending by more than $1 trillion this year while occasionally styling themselves as deficit hawks.