Will you pass the Pork
By Pat Boone
Worldnetdaily.com
February 24, 2007
Have you heard the latest version of the old fairy tale? The one about the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf?
Yelled the menacing wolf, "Open the door and let me in, you three fat juicy little pigs – or I'll huff, and I'll puff, and I'll blow your house down!"
Retorted the three pigs, indeed fat and smug, and chortling with self-satisfaction, "Go ahead and huff and puff all you want, old wolf! We've already borrowed and leveraged all the value out of this old dump, and we're leaving. You can have it before it falls down under the weight of its own debt!"
Hope you like a steady, extremely expensive diet of pork these days; you're sure paying through the nose for it. And so am I. And so are all the dutiful taxpayers in the United States. "Pork," in the form of "earmarks," a fancy name for old-fashioned pork barrel projects, is inserted into legislation by members of Congress during "conference" committee sessions without debate or discussion. Congress has this legislative process set up in such a way that members are stuck with voting on a bloated, unconscionably padded conference version of a huge appropriation bill – or starting the entire complicated, time-consuming process over from scratch.
That seldom ever happens, both from intimidation by the "old boys club" (Congress itself) and from unwillingness to tackle the formidable task of initiating a newly written bill that might not pass either.
Remember the notorious "Bridge to Nowhere," proposed to link 50 residents on Gravina Island, Alaska, to the rest of the state, at a cost to you and me of $223 million? Would you knowingly have signed your name to that check?
Earmarks are very often the result of sweetheart deals with various special interest groups. They're meant to buy votes back home – with our taxpayer money. For decades and decades, that's the way the game has been played – one hand washing the other, one congressman getting his back scratched today, understanding that he'll be scratching other backs tomorrow. It's infuriating, it's devastating to the economy, and it's just plain wrong. It's really larceny on a high, seemingly unstoppable level.
Well, as I've noted here before, into this sordid scene a real-life "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" has appeared, determined to disrupt the corrupt status quo and actually hold elected representatives accountable to the people they were elected to represent: people such as you and me!
He's U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn, M.D., a genuine Okie from Muskogee, tapped by Oklahoma voters for the Senate in 2004 after serving six years in the House during the '90s. He has the novel expectation that his fellow senators and congressmen should act responsibly and promote the general welfare (including the economic welfare) of all American citizens, not just the voters in his home state.
Incensed at what he found in the institutionalized "pork barrel," he began working closely with the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization under the Internal Revenue Code. Its focus is to educate the general public about public-policy issues, not to support or oppose specific legislation. Simply, he feels you and I have the right to know who's spending our hard-earned money and to know what they're spending it on.
And I'm talking about huge, almost unimaginable amounts of our tax money, on projects I suspect you don't need or want.
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Did you vote to spend $300,000 for wool research in Montana, Texas and Wyoming?
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$450,000 for the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y. – for educational outreach using baseball to teach students through "distance learning technology"?
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$739,000 to build a historical resource support center at the Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Park?
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$350,000 for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland for "music education programs"?
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$150,000 for the Coca-Cola Space Science Center in Columbus, Ga., in the district of a House VA/HUD Appropriations subcommittee member – as if poor Coca-Cola couldn't afford to pay for its own Space Center?
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How about $3,000,000 for a House of Representatives staff fitness facility (perhaps so staffers can work off all that pork at taxpayers' expense), despite the close proximity of two private gyms?
These are literally flyspecks on the list of pork-barrel projects in our horribly escalating recent federal budgets. Ready for the really bad news?
In 1994, there were 1,318 pork-barrel projects; in fiscal year 2005 there were nearly 15,877 pork barrel projects – an increase of 1,204 percent! The cost: a whopping $47 billion!
It seems that even politicians who once claimed to be fiscal conservatives can't seem to resist the temptation to spend taxpayer money to stay in office. After all, it's not their money. It's ours.
So Sen. Coburn and the APF have launched a sweeping reform agenda that includes:
- Banning unauthorized earmarks for private entities that serve private interests at the expense of the public interest;
- Ending loopholes that exempt taxpayer-funded government lobbyists from congressional ethics rules;
- Requiring lobbying firms, lobbyists and their political action committees to disclose more information about their campaign contributions to federal candidates and officeholders;
- Bringing greater transparency to the lobbying industry (and we do mean industry, of giant proportion).
Coburn and the APF are planning to buy, with privately donated funds, not tax money, massive amounts of TV time to air spots that will educate the American people about where our money is going, what's wrong in Washington and how to fix it. He's not real popular right now "inside the Beltway." But he deserves support, from you and me and every taxpayer.
Senator Tom Coburn
Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information, and International Security
340 Dirksen Senate Office Building Washington, DC 20510
Phone: 202-224-2254 Fax: 202-228-3796
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