Have things really gotten that bad? →
U.S. government is cruel, despotic, a threat to people →
robbing the public and spending irresponsibly →
pork spending
And there’s no sign of slowing down.
Word on the street is that Dubya is looking for some circuses to butter his bread with and has decided on a bold expansion to the space program — we’re going back to the moon, and then to mars!
Wheeee!
And if something has to go, something else has to inflate to fill its gap:
In this case, highway funding.
The White House budget allocated $256 billion over six years for highway funding.
That didn’t last long in the Red-ink Republican Congress — the Senate just passed a bill more than $50 billion fatter.
(The version of the bill being prepared in the House is another $50+ billion fatter than that!)
Interesting post.… engaged in a bit of direct action there, yourself, it seems.…
violating social conventions to actually discuss a method of non-violent civil disobedience.
If a meeting advertises for revolutionaries, it should not be surprised when at least one shows up.
You could still be a wingnut, but such people are often useful, and do not forget your “history of the demise of slavery postings.”
All that change probably required a wingnut or two to leaven things.
Yes, you are a wingnut, and yes you accurately and meaningfully challenged to idiocy with which you were faced at the New College panel.
Isn’t it possible for both choices to be true at the same time?
And I note that the National Pork Council is back at work…
As the income tax filing deadline approaches, the news is full of stories about how our money is taken and spent.
Citizens Against Government Waste today announced the winners of the Oinkers — the silliest and worst examples of pork barrel spending from ’s Pig Book.
’s total reveals that Congress porked out at record levels.
For , appropriators stuck 10,656 projects in the 13 appropriations bills, an increase of 13 percent over last year’s total of 9,362.
In the last two years, the total number of projects has increased 28 percent.
The cost of these projects in fiscal 2004 was $22.9 billion, or 1.6 percent more than last year’s total of $22.5 billion.
In fact, the total cost of pork has increased by 14 percent .
Total pork identified by Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) adds up to $185 billion.
That’s $185 billion that was stolen from you and me and given away to campaign contributors or spent lavishly on reelection-related program activities.
In an unusual session, the lame-duck House of Representatives and Senate approved the spending bill, a 14-pound document that few lawmakers had time to read.
$100 million in grants to study berries in Alaska, wine in Washington, hydroponic tomatoes in Ohio, and maple syrup in Vermont.
$300,000 for a parking garage in Auburn, Maine.
$300,000 to Missoula, Mont., for the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.
$1.1 million for research into the development of baby food and other products made from salmon.
$250,000 to Nashville, Tenn., for the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Alaska alone gets $950,000 for a recreation center, $150,000 for a botanical garden, $300,000 for a senior center, $1 million for housing upgrades, $900,000 for an aquarium, and $525,000 for a quarry upgrade.
And that’s not a complete list.
Because of their powerful senator, whom no one else in the GOP will stand up to, the federal government spends $12,000 on every Alaskan, double the national average.
Grab-bag time:
Wired reports that among the lessons learned from the study of the collapse of the World Trade Center is that you obey the advice of official authority at your peril:
After both buildings were burning, many calls to 911 resulted in advice to stay put and wait for rescue.
Also, occupants of the towers had been trained to use the stairs, not the elevators, in case of evacuation.
Fortunately, this advice was mostly ignored.
According to the engineers, use of elevators in the early phase of the evacuation, along with the decision to not stay put, saved roughly 2,500 lives.…
We know that US borders are porous, that major targets are largely undefended, and that the multicolor threat alert scheme known affectionately as “the rainbow of doom” is a national joke.
Anybody who has been paying attention probably suspects that if we rely on orders from above to protect us, we’ll be in terrible shape.
But in a networked era, we have increasing opportunities to help ourselves.
This is the real source of homeland security: not authoritarian schemes of surveillance and punishment, but multichannel networks of advice, information, and mutual aid.
Among the authorities you are best-advised to ignore (void where prohibited) is the Transportation Security Administration, which has wasted no time in the years since its post-9/11 founding in becoming a stupid and wasteful bureaucracy.
Among the items that showed up in a recent audit of the agency were a $526.95 domestic phone call, $1,180 for conference-room coffee, and $1,540 to rent 14 extension cords for three weeks.
Today’s theme is pork.
I suppose we can thank the folks at Harper’s for getting the ball rolling.
They’ve got a nice cover story and an nicer cover illustration on the subject — alas, only the latter is on-line.
Some excerpts:
There was no time to produce a clean copy, so the version of the omnibus bill that Congress voted on was a fourteen-inch-thick clump of papers with corrections, deletions, and additions on virtually every page.
Handwritten notes peppered the margins… [T]he omnibus bill came to a vote before the full House some sixteen hours later… For the legislators who approved it — by a margin of 344–51 in the House and 65–30 in the Senate — reading the 3,320-page bill before the vote would have been a mathematical impossibility.…
As approved at the appropriations meeting, the Foreign Operations bill had contained a mere nine earmarks.
The omnibus measure, which was completed after two feverish days of work, allocated money for 11,772 separate earmarks.
There was $100,000 for goat-meat research in Texas, $549,000 for “Future Foods” development in Illinois, $569,000 for “Cool Season Legume Research” in Idaho and Washington, $63,000 for a program to combat noxious weeds in the desert Southwest, $175,000 for obesity research in Texas.
In the end, the bill’s earmarks were worth a combined total of nearly $16 billion — a figure almost as large as the annual budget of the Department of Agriculture and roughly twice that of the Environmental Protection Agency.
It was the biggest single piece of pork-barrel legislation in American history.
Of who added these grants, no public record exists.
Except in rare cases, members of Congress will refuse to discuss their involvement in establishing earmarks, and the appropriations committees have a blanket rule against commenting.
Often it is difficult to discern even who is receiving the funds: earmarks are itemized in bills but generally without disclosure of the direct recipient — just a dollar amount, destination, and broad purpose.…
Congress, taking advantage of wartime support of national defense spending, is using the military’s budget to steer billions to pet projects that apparently have little to do with Iraq or the ongoing war on terrorism, according to congressional documents, government budget officials, and watchdog groups.
The projects range from an unneeded warship and a seriously flawed cargo plane the Pentagon tried to cancel to millions each for a Mississippi wastewater treatment plant, a Nevada fire training station, and a Texas research hospital, the documents show.
Molly Ivins shows how brazen the kickbacks have become in this brand of beltway soccer, by using the example of Representative Duke Cunningham, of the House Defense Appropriations Committee:
In , [Cunningham] sold his house in Del Mar, a very upscale town north of San Diego.
The buyer was Mitchell Wade, a defense contractor, who paid $1.675 million.
Wade later resold the house at a $700,000 loss.
Now, either this makes Wade the only person in recent history to lose money on a San Diego real estate deal, or the guy paid way too much for the house.
The deal is now under investigation by a grand jury.
Cunningham in turn used the money he made from the Del Mar deal to buy a $2.55 million home in Rancho Santa Fe.
Meanwhile, back in Washington, Cunningham is living, rent-free, aboard a 42-foot yacht named the Duke Stir, which belongs to the said same Mitchell Wade.
, Wade’s company, MZM Inc., has received $163 million in defense contracts.
When lobbyists aren’t bribing legislators to get their hands on your money directly, they’re lobbying for preferential tax treatment, or for beneficial changes to the multitude of laws that can make or break a large company.
They’d be fools or angels not to, since a small bribe is a lever that can move mountains of other people’s money or can tilt the playing-field of a whole industry in favor of one company or another.
More and more, companies are finding their investments in politicians to be those that give the highest returns.
Legislators are like the mamma bird hovering over the nest with a gullet full of chewed up worms to give away.
The lobbyists are like the baby birds, greedy and amoral and relentless.
We’re the worms.
The Onion will be hosted at The Washington Times this week:
Mr. DeLay was defending Republicans’ choice to borrow money and add to this year’s expected $331 billion deficit to pay for Hurricane Katrina relief.
Some Republicans have said Congress should make cuts in other areas, but Mr. DeLay said that doesn’t seem possible.
“My answer to those that want to offset the spending is sure, bring me the offsets, I’ll be glad to do it.
But nobody has been able to come up with any yet,” the Texas Republican told reporters at his weekly briefing.
Asked if that meant the government was running at peak efficiency, Mr. DeLay said, “Yes, after 11 years of Republican majority we’ve pared it down pretty good.”
Congress has passed two hurricane relief bills totaling $62.3 billion, all of which will be added to the deficit.
Worth reading in this regard is a story about how one U.S. Representative Davy Crockett of Tennessee (yes, he of the wild frontier) came to regret passing a bill appropriating $20,000 of other peoples’ money for the assistance of those who were left homeless and suffering in the wake of a large fire in Georgetown.
For an overview of federal incomes and outgoes over , there’s always the numbers from the Congressional Budget Office.
(Hint: , the feds spent $1,461,900,000,000; “after of Republican majority” the total became $2,292,200,000,000.)
The Tax Foundation has been the best source of pithy press releases, reports and graphs about the “Lucky Ducky” phenomenon — that is, that there is an increasing number and percentage of people in the United States who don’t earn enough money to pay any income tax.
Alas, they see this as a problem, while to me it is a solution.
But anyway, they’ve got a new “Fiscal Fact” out that tries to make this point that we could lower the tax rates on all the income that is taxed now if only we would start taxing all that income that isn’t.
By their estimation, fully 60% of the income earned in the United States today is covered by credits, deductions, exemptions, or is an untaxed transfer or benefit, or is earned in the underground economy and undeclared, or is earned by people too poor to need to file tax returns in the first place.
In other words, only 40% of the income earned in the United States is taxed at any rate at all by the IRS.
They hope this shocking fact will encourage lawmakers to “broaden the tax base” — which is to say, make more of that 60% taxable, so they can lower the tax rates on the 40%.
This analysis does the traditional wealth-lobby think tank tax trick of pretending that the Social Security / Medicare / payroll / FICA tax doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter.
It’s pretty clear that much of the reason for the lower-income exclusion from income tax is the larger burden of FICA for people at a low income.
With the federal government siphoning off this FICA money into the general fund, and with none other than the President himself saying that the IOUs given in return are worthless, it’s hard to believe that FICA is anything but an additional form of income tax — like the federal income tax and the AMT.
Remarkably, though, the Republicans in Congress immediately thought of squeezing the poor in this way when it came time to try to find money to pay for the coming Katrina boondoggle (what? you expected them to look for offsetting spending cuts?):
Don’t worry, San Francisco, nobody is really going to call that bluff.
You’ll get your pork, and everywhere else with powerful enough congresscritters will too, and Halliburton will get its boondoggle cash to themeparkize New Orleans, and they’ll just put it on our tab as usual:
