Soccer Dad: The msm fight against pork continues

September 28, 2005

The msm fight against pork continues

Anne Applebaum follows up on yesterday's Post editorial with "Corruption as Usual":

Most of the time, members of Congress don't accept cash bribes in unmarked envelopes. Most of the time, senators don't pay for their daughters' wedding receptions out of government slush funds. Most of the time, American politicians don't put their ill-gotten gains into numbered Swiss bank accounts or get the Mafia to launder their money. But corruption comes in many forms, and in this country it comes in the dull-sounding, unglamorous, switch-off-the-television form of infrastructure appropriations.

As Instpundit would write "Ouch."

Applebaum doesn't just turn her attention to the Katrina relief package she also sets her sights on the highway bill:

Nor does this logic apply only to obvious boondoggles such as federal transportation spending, the last $286 billion tranche of which funded Virginia horse trails, Vermont snowmobile trails, a couple of "bridges to nowhere" in rural Alaska and decorative trees for a California freeway named after Ronald Reagan (a president who once vetoed a transportation bill because it contained too much pork).

and homeland security spending:

Because neither the administration nor Congress is prepared to do an honest risk assessment, and because no one dares say that there are states at almost no risk of terrorist attack, a good chunk of homeland security funding is distributed according to formulas that give minimum amounts to every state. The inevitable result: In 2004 the residents of Wyoming received, per capita, seven times more money for first responders than the residents of New York City.

In McCulloch vs. Maryland Chief Justice John Marshall famously wrote that "... the power to tax involves the power to destroy ..." Perhaps I can offer Gerstman's corollary to Marshall, "The power to spend involves the power to get reelected."

In order to justify their positions, politicians love to show that they're doing something. The best proof that they're accomplishing something is to bring home the bacon or pork. What's a better campaign slogan: "I fought for funding to improve the highway" or "I chose not to spend other people's tax money for this district/ state."

And this isn't just a problem for Democrats, as Jonah Goldberg recently wrote:

As we look to the future, what are we supposed to say? Hell no his overspending isn�t irresponsibly lavish! His overspending is simply responsibly lavish! The porkbusters fight is fun now, but not since early cave men tried to train grizzly bears to give them tongue-baths has a project seemed more obviously doomed to end in disappointment. Expecting Congress � of either party � to give back pork which has already been approved and passed into law is like expecting crack whores to give refunds days after services have been rendered.

(Implicitly his column makes the case for getting a Democrat elected President. There is probably no better to ensure that Republicans in Congress remember that they're the party of small government as we see from President Clinton's years with a Republican Congress. Mickey Kaus wrote something like that in the run up to the 2000 election.)

Wouldn't it be remarkable if one of the effects of the Katrina relief effort was to make the country more cognizant and, consequently, more resistant to wasteful spending?

Technorati tags: porkbusters, Katrina, spending.