The Audacity of Pork

First it was a promise of doing things differently. A more ethical White House, but that dream flew out the window with Turbo Tax Timmy, Tom Daschle and some woman who didn't stick around long enough for anyone to remember her name as a nominee for some made up office. George Bush may have made up words, but President Obama is making up 6 figure jobs, one at a time. In truth, President Obama should be in charge of collections at the IRS. Nobody gets people to pay their delinquent taxes any better than he does with his nominations.

Later it would be a $1.1 trillion dollar stimulus package that had something for everyone. And the best part was that Congressional Democrats would take the rap for all that pork. Senator Max Baucus got $26 billion for private equity firms. Senator Robert Byrd got 4.6 billion for his constituents and clean coal, which Obama contends is a fallacy. Even under the guise of green education, there was $100 million for children to learn green construction. Seriously? Children can learn green construction on the job after they drop out of high school, they don't need $100 million for it in elementary school. Don't forget, this is a do as I say, not a do as I do White House.

However, while Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and the rest of the Dems on the Hill loaded up the stimulus with pork barrel spending, the President was still watching out for his friends. There was $4 billion, give or take, for community action groups like ACORN.

Now with the door of public opinion getting slammed on the fingers of hill Democrats, they revised the bill down, from $1.1 trillion, to $827 billion. They cut the bill by about a third, but does anyone believe that the pork is all gone? I sure don't. You can rest assured that there is plenty of extraneous spending in this bill and that there will be plenty of favors returned. Eight and quarter billion dollars to be spent at break neck speed leaves a lot of room for fudging and not much time to catch the pork spending.

One last thing to consider... when a Senator or Congressman attaches a piece of pork to a piece of spending, he or she is doing what they need to do, to keep their constituents happy and get themselves reelected, but are they really acting in the best interests of their constituents? Not very often. That’s the inherent conflict of interest in Capitol Hill politics. All to often, the players are busy trying to get reelected as opposed to fulfilling their oath of office to best serve the people.