The Discerning Texan

All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke

Thursday, September 13, 2007

The Democrat Pork Fest Continues in Congress and the Senate

As Senate Democrats brace for its showdown with the Bush Administration over Pork in its Appropriations Bills, Captain Ed has a look at the Transportation Bill, and at some of the ways that your Democrat Congress is choosing to use the tax money which they confiscate from you. And, as the esteemed Mr. Morrissey points out, those partisans who are using the tragedy Minneapolis bridge collapse to suggest that even more federal money should be confiscated, are being disingenuous to say the least:

Want to know what had to be cut from the bill in order to get the North Dakota Peace Garden? Oh, just a silly little project that would have updated technology in air-traffic control towers. But the Peace Garden wasn't the only beneficiary of freeing up funds from making air travel safer. California will also get a "mule and packer museum". Perhaps Americans can start traveling by donkey instead.

Senator Tom Coburn attempted to stop the pork party, to no avail. He offered an amendment that would have forbidden earmarks on transportation bills until all deficient bridges had been properly updated. That just barely failed -- by a vote of 82 to 14. Eighty-two Senators voted to prioritize pork over infrastructure maintenance.

In fact, the pork comes to one out of every eight dollars spent on transportation now. In the past eleven years, earmarks have increased a whopping 1150%, while the dollar value of the pork has increased over 300% in the same period. Ninety-nine percent of these earmarks bypassed planning agencies, meaning that the monies got no review for prioritization. How many bridges could have been repaired with that money over the last decade? How many baseball fields in places like Billings got built instead?

Eight billion dollars would build 32 new St. Anthony Bridges. How many hundreds could it have repaired? And that's just this transportation bill.

Politicians like Jim Oberstar love their bike paths and museums, especially when they have their names attached to them. Oberstar and his ilk would rather spend money on their vanity projects than infrastructure. And after demonstrating such perverse priorities on managing our money, the porkers have the temerity to demand even more in taxes to do what they should have done from the beginning.

Of course, you can change this: vote these yahoos out of office next year.

Labels: Congress, Democrat, Earmarks, Pork, US Senate