We Need a Kosher President

That way, he wouldn't tolerate any pork, unlike the current occupent of 1600 Penn.

Three years ago, President Bush went to war against congressional pork. His official 2003 budget even featured a color photo of a wind-powered ice sled -- an example of the pet projects and alleged boondoggles he said he would no longer tolerate.

Yesterday, Bush effectively signed a cease-fire -- critics called it more like a surrender -- in his war on pork. He signed into law a $286 billion transportation measure that contains a record 6,371 pet projects inserted by members of Congress from both parties.

That's roughly 12 projects per member; it has to be somewhat spread out, since I don't think West Virginia has that many highways, tunnels and bridges that Porkasaurus Rex hasn't already arranged.

No, Mr. President, vee toe isn't something you get from walking around the locker room. It's something that presidents are allowed to do to bills that don't deserve to be passed. I know you're not accustomed to using it. In fact, you never have vetoed a bill as President.

Might I suggest starting sometime soon. Rumor has it you might whip out the veto pen on the ESCR funding bill. You could have gotten some practice in with this one, but, alas, you didn't.

Does it violate the 11th Commandment to call him a bleeding-heart conservative who can't gather the courage to stop the pork machine? This isn't even on one of those heart-tugging issues where you can make a decent policy case for the extra spending; it's roads and bridges and congressmen getting funding for stuff that's not needed that much.

Comments

[duvidil]

The community college district in my city is building a new nursing school. A bond issue that would have put it on one side of town, in a medical center but right on top of another nursing school, was voted down -- probably a good thing. Now it looks as if some of the teaching will be done at downtown hospitals (an appropriate place: plenty of teaching material, not in the medical center, and easy to get to on public transportation) but some of the new classroom space will be built in a poor part of town, partly to spread the pork around. This will add an estimated 5%-10% to the total cost of the project. There may be advantages bought with that 5-10%, since making it easy for poor students to start nursing school probably has a value. Since that value is too hard to measure, it usually gets left out of the equation.

My point is, how much extra expense is reasonable to spread the pork around equitably? I think it's worth at least 5%. That doesn't mean the extra 8.4% in the highway bill for earmarked projects is necessarily tolerable, since there could easily be 5% 'pork equity expense' already built in to the rest of the bill. But I think we should just accept that a democracy will buy some extra fat in its pork.

I used to think Congress should have committees to see that the pork gets distributed equitably. Then I realized Congress already has them -- they're called the House and Senate, and have 435 and 100 members, respectively.