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Money in the Banana Stand: A Congressional Deception Illustrated

By Bryan Berky | July 27, 2017

In a move more deceptive than Discovery Channel’s Shark Week promos, Senate appropriators once again voted to protect a budget gimmick to use money designated for victims of crime as a $11.2 billion slush fund for other purposes.

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During consideration of the Commerce, Justice, and Science appropriations bill today, Senator James Lankford (R-OK) offered an amendment that would prohibit the practice of using a budget gimmick to spend an extra $11 billion.  His effort failed by an overwhelming majority: 5-26 (Sens. Lankford, Blunt, Daines, Kennedy, and Durbin voted aye).

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The gimmick uses a concept known as Changes in Mandatory Program Spending (CHIMPs) and an account called the Crime Victims Fund (CVF).  To illustrate how CHIMPs works, let’s just monkey around for a moment.  Let’s just say you collect 10 bananas to put in your banana stand.  You only eat 2 of them, thus having 8 left over to use for phone calls.  The next day, you eat 2 of the remaining bananas in your banana stand.  In every jungle around the world, you would now have 6 bananas left.  Except in Congress, where they claim that you now have 14 bananas in your banana stand: 8 that you didn’t eat yesterday and 6 that you didn’t eat today.   And since there is always money in Congress’ banana stand – Congress can use those 14 bananas (8 of which are fake) to spend on brand new courthouses or science studies or really anything else in the federal budget.

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This is how Congress fudges the numbers to spend more of your money.  The Crime Victims Fund is a pot of money comprised of fines on criminals that are supposed to go towards the victims of the crimes.  But Congress puts a cap on how much of the now $15.4 billion in funds in the account that can be spent.  This year, they are capping it at $3.6 billion.  Meaning they are not spending $12 billion that they “could have spent” and will use that to offset more spending everywhere else.  Last year, they did not spend $8 billion of the exact same money and spent it elsewhere.  And the year before that.  And the year before that.  Then Sen. Jeff Sessions analogized that “it would be like a family delaying a single $500 home repair for ten years and counting it as $5,000 in savings—$500 for every year the repair didn’t take place.”

This bookkeeping is a fabrication. A deception.  A lie.  Yet, Congress keeps utilizing the CHIMP gimmick year after year because it lets them spend more of your money than they otherwise could – on pace for $100 billion more over the next 10 years.

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Trust is a rare attribute in Washington.  If members of Congress are tired of getting accused of wrongdoing, then they should stop doing wrong.  Voting with a straight face to protect this blatant gimmick does not help their cause.

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