Pork Hype
The Club for Growth (a very active player in the blogosphere's "porkbusting" efforts) points to this quote from New York Rep. John Sweeney:
I think calling the concern over pork "false" goes a bit too far. Certainly the idea of our government wasting 1.5 million dollars on a single bus stop or 223 million dollars for a bridge longer than the Brooklyn Bridge in rural Alaska is troubling. But while that sort of local spending is both fiscally irresponsible and totally outside of the federal government's responsibility, Sweeney is right. It's just one percent of a federal budget that is frought with much more serious spending issues.
Like entitlements, for instance:
The other day anti-pork crusader Mary Katharine Ham stopped by Say Anything to say that she "would argue that Porkbusting can be a good, low-hanging-fruit way to create a political climate in which we can work on reining in entitlement spending, so it can be sustainable." I understand where she's coming from and think we're on the same page as far as government spending in general goes, but the way I see it "our side" only has so much political capital available to go after goverment waste.
If Congress is going to enact legislation in Congress to combat waste spending the sort of wasteful spending it should address first should be entitlements.
The big three entitlements - Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - represent about $3 billion dollars of government spending each and every day, and that spending is growing at about an 8% annual clip. That is an unsustainable amount of government spending and unless we do something about it $232 million for some dumb bridge in Alaska isn't going to matter. We'll have bigger problems on our plate.
“Earmarks are one percent of the federal budget, so the buzz coming from the Jeff Flakes on my side of the aisle, and from some demagogue Democrats is just false."
I think calling the concern over pork "false" goes a bit too far. Certainly the idea of our government wasting 1.5 million dollars on a single bus stop or 223 million dollars for a bridge longer than the Brooklyn Bridge in rural Alaska is troubling. But while that sort of local spending is both fiscally irresponsible and totally outside of the federal government's responsibility, Sweeney is right. It's just one percent of a federal budget that is frought with much more serious spending issues.
Like entitlements, for instance:
The other day anti-pork crusader Mary Katharine Ham stopped by Say Anything to say that she "would argue that Porkbusting can be a good, low-hanging-fruit way to create a political climate in which we can work on reining in entitlement spending, so it can be sustainable." I understand where she's coming from and think we're on the same page as far as government spending in general goes, but the way I see it "our side" only has so much political capital available to go after goverment waste.
If Congress is going to enact legislation in Congress to combat waste spending the sort of wasteful spending it should address first should be entitlements.
The big three entitlements - Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - represent about $3 billion dollars of government spending each and every day, and that spending is growing at about an 8% annual clip. That is an unsustainable amount of government spending and unless we do something about it $232 million for some dumb bridge in Alaska isn't going to matter. We'll have bigger problems on our plate.
) prior to a speech I attended in which she and Laura Bush were basically discribing their effort and presedent’s Bush effor to accomplish this. 
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