Hey, Sucker, Wanna Balance the Budget? : How about the $2.3 million in pork that fattens the Speaker’s neighborhood every day?

What a wonderful circus Congress has become, full of dazzling sideshows and con artists working the rubes in the aisles. Hey, sucker, wanna balance the budget? Let Ringmaster Newt show you how.

First, eliminate the Corporation for Public Broadcasting ($285 million), the National Endowment for the Humanities ($177 million) and that other one for the Arts ($167 million). Add it up, pretend that a million is a billion and we’re outta here. You think the voters will catch on? Nah. Hey, with term limits, by the time the balanced-budget amendment goes into effect, House Speaker Newt Gingrich will be long gone.

Meanwhile, make sure that nothing serious gets cut. Certainly not military spending, like the $72 billion for the Lockheed F-22 fighter planes manufactured in Marietta, Ga.--Gingrich’s back yard. Sure, he attacks federal spending, but Gingrich doesn’t mean in his Cobb County, one of the biggest recipients of federal dollars in the country--$2.3 million a day.

Some pinko will try to make a big deal of the fact that Gingrich wants 442 F-22s and cutting just one plane would pay for the arts budget. We’re talking defense, and everybody knows that whoever has the best defense wins the Super Bowl. That’s why Gingrich wants to revive “Star Wars,” not just because it’s another Lockheed workfare program.

Don’t worry about the public rejecting a new defense buildup as a budget buster. That’s the way the budget was “balanced” for the 12 years that the Republicans ran the White House, and the taxpayers never noticed. Sure, the Democrats keep pointing out that 28 cents of every tax dollar goes to pay the interest on the Republican debt, but when was the last time you heard that treated seriously on a talk show?

And forget about the so-called respectable media catching on. We’ll keep them busy arguing about whether teen-age mothers and their babies are better off hungry. Of course, we’re not really going to starve them; that would look wrong. Trust us, we’ve been “eliminating” welfare since Nixon was President, and nothing happens except the payments get smaller, the rolls get larger and middle-class crowds roar.

More knowledgeable supporters will credit our serious achievements. Already, Aerospace America magazine said this about our revolution: “Whatever else may result from this mid-term vote, the ballot box may have saved . . . the Air Force F-22 fighter.”

You can bet Lockheed will remember that Gingrich “saved” the F-22, which the Defense Department was about to postpone just because it’s so expensive and had no obvious use in the aftermath of the Cold War. Aerospace America wrote that “no potential enemy today has a fighter that is so advanced or so costly.” It’s useless for fighting the nasty regional wars we now face. As Army Maj. Gen. Jay Garner said, the F-22 is “the wrong airplane for the land-support function,” and its stealth capability “while impressive, is unnecessary.”

Big deal. This isn’t about war--it’s about business, and Republicans were not put on this Earth to let some bureaucrats stop an American businessman from making a buck. Heck, it was President Nixon who bailed Lockheed out with $1 billion when they were going bankrupt in 1971. And you never heard a Republican leader complain about cost overruns on Lockheed’s C-5B cargo plane just because the Air Force called it “the largest by far claim of faulty pricing on a single Pentagon program.”

I don’t need to remind you that Lockheed gives a lot of political money to candidates: $503,000 from June, 1993, through September, 1994, including $15,000 to Gingrich. Now, Lockheed is about to merge with Martin-Marietta, making the combined firm the largest defense contractor in the world, with a projected $22.5 billion in annual revenue.

Don’t let the McGovernite peaceniks tell you this is just about protecting corporate profits. There are 170,000 defense jobs at the combined company: good jobs that pay enough to support families, not Mickey Mouse minimum-wage stuff or welfare.

Do the bleeding-heart liberals want us to give up those jobs just because we don’t need the planes? Or to quit manufacturing those planes but continue paying defense workers while they get retrained? That’s socialist, and as Gingrich says, socialism is killing this country with all those federal programs.

Hey, sucker, wanna balance the budget?