Boyda defends votes
Earmark proposals explained

By BOB JOHNSON
Register City Editor

 

Nancy Boyda gestures during an answer to a question at the Humboldt Senior Center Monday afternoon.

Nancy Boyda has thick skin.
She has to have to survive, Boyda allowed during one of her Congress on Your Corner sessions at Humboldt’s Senior Center Monday afternoon.
Earmarks are a trickle of money, in comparison to all federal expenditures, from Washington, D.C. that members of Congress, House and Senate, propose for projects within their districts or states. Unlike most others, Boyda released the ones she proposed and they became fodder for political junkies on the 24-hour news channels.
None rivaled the infamous Alaskan “bridge to nowhere,” a $300 million project offered by Alaska Rep. Don Young to build a bridge from Ketchikan, population 8,000, to Gavina, an island where 80 people live, but “I still got a tongue lashing,” Boyda said.
She explained one to Humboldt listeners, a $100,000 proposal to aid construction of a museum in Lansing that would include $2 million to $3 million in private funding.
“There are four prisons there, including a U.S. prison and the U.S. military maximum detention center, and 14 men have given their lives,” working as prison guards, she said. “As a country we want to preserve our heritage and having a museum that documents the history of Lansing and its prisons is, I think, a good idea.”
To taxpayers’ advantage, Boyda thinks the Office of Management and Budget will announce soon that earmarks proposed by all in Congress will become a part of very visible public records.
She also mentioned frequent attacks, including many from the Republican National Committee, that claim she, a Democrat, is eager to raise taxes.
(A little background is helpful: Boyda defeated Jim Ryun in 2006, ending his five-term, 10-year stay in the U.S. House. He defeated Boyda in 2004, but she persevered and was elected with an aggressive in-your-face campaign in 2006. The RNC has targeted Boyda’s seat, and Ryun and Lynn Jenkins, Kansas treasurer, are seeking the GOP nomination for the right to face her in the November general election.)
Boyda is eager to end $18 billion in annual subsidies to the five biggest oil companies particularly in light of them having $181 billion in profits last year, and is critical of similar subsidies to the health insurance industry. Meanwhile, she voted against $22 billion in cuts to domestic programs, “including money to Area Agency on Aging, which funds this place (Humboldt’s Senior Center).”
“My opposition to he subsidies and cuts in domestic spending, money that filters down to help local government that has to face unfunded federal mandates, has been reported as me voting for tax increases,” Boyda said. “I’m in favor of keeping the tax cuts in place in for the middle class, but not for the very wealth and corporations” that enjoy huge profits.
“No one thinks tax money should go to subsidize big oil, except in Washington along partisan lines.”
She also mentioned that the top 16 hedge fund managers each made more than $1 billion last year, but none paid income tax.
“They paid 15 percent on capital gains, but no income taxes,” she said. “Does anyone think that’s right?”
And, Boyda said, hedge-fund gambling with commodities prices is largely responsible for their escalation, a burden on everyday Americans who have difficulty paying food, fuel and energy bills. The mega-money game also will come home to roost for farmers, Boyda fears.
“Input costs for crops are continuing to rise. A ton of nitrogen costs $800, maybe $900 or a $1,000 and do you think it and other input costs are going to come down when commodity prices drop?”

“I WENT to Washington to make life better for everyone. Sometimes I think we can, sometimes I get awfully frustrated,” Boyda told about 40 people who listened to her 90-minute presentation, followed by individual conversations with constituents.
“Good people go off to Washington and change. I worry some about that. I don’t want to ‘go Washington,’” become insulated from the realties of everyday life in the 2nd District.
“Democracy is a contact sport and it also is a team sport. You have to understand what you’re doing” and how it plays out through layers of government, from the federal level to state to local.
“I think changes slowly are changing in Washington,” she said. “You can see it month by month.
Illegal immigration was mentioned by several constituents.
Boyda said she preferred an identification system, through Social Security registration, that would offer better verification “than what we have now, which is a failure and inaccurate as much as 15 percent of the time.”
She has proposed documentation, with a photograph, name and Social Security number, in a computer database that could be checked at the click of a mouse.
“I don’t know the answer to world peace, but I don’t think immigration is that hard,” she said, noting that documenting newcomers and checking employers’ records shouldn’t be difficult.
“Problems we have with immigration are because of availability of jobs” and employers who are willing to take advantage of workers so eager to earn better pay than is available in Mexico. “If those jobs go away,” mainly with thorough documentation, “the problem will take care of itself.”
The oil crisis, with gasoline prices the graphic example, should have been dealt with long before it became so critical, Boyda said.
“We’ve (elected officials) waited until the last minute,” she said. “It’s been coming for 30 years. We need to recognize what’s going on and do something about it before it becomes a crisis.”
That led Boyda to comments about conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“These aren’t my words, rather those of a study group: We’re close to a strategic failure in Afghanistan,” she said. “Gen. Prateus told us we need to redeploy troops to Afghanistan. A stable Iraq is important, but so is a stable Afghanistan.”
Boyda has concerns about pre-positioned stocks to support troops, which have been depleted by the prolonged war in Iraq, and what would happen should another 9/11 type event occur.
During a briefing, she was told that “if we get every penny (for resupply) on time, it will be 2013 before out pre-positioned stocks will be replenished. If something else, on the order of 9/11 occurs, I don’t know what we’ll do. The Air Force and Navy can response with overwhelming force,” but staying power of ground troops would be difficult to maintain.
The military does not favor reinstatement of the draft, she added, as a means of ramping up troop numbers.
“They want people who want to be in the military, those who are eager to be involved,” Boyda said.
The alternative, she said, “is that troop rotations are going to stop. We’re going to have to leave troops in the field for much longer periods of time.”
Meanwhile, “my job is to keep America safe and my fear is that we’re probably not going to get through the next five years without some unexpected event and it probably will come from the Parkistan-Afghanistan border,” where she thinks the U.S. military has lagged because of emphasis on Iraq.