I’m not talking about the price of the “other” white meat; I’m talking about the sort of pork that buys votes in Congress.  According to the Heritage Foundation, runaway discretionary spending by Congress ballooned to $20,000 per household this year.  That figure represents the highest spending level in this country since World War II.  Among recent legislation filled with pork barrel projects, two of the biggest offenders are the Medicaid bill and the Energy bill, but the recent 2004 Omnibus Spending Bill probably tops them both.

I heard Rush Limbaugh defending Bush against criticism by fiscally conservative Republicans who are increasingly upset about the lack of constraint and out of control spending, by basically saying that George Bush didn’t run on a platform of a balanced budget and smaller government, so they shouldn’t hold him to something he didn’t promise.  Aren’t Democrats the ones that are supposed to “big government”?  I’ve never seen our government get so “big” and I’m really concerned about how we are going to pay for all this on top of what Iraq is already costing us. 

Did you know that we borrow a lot of this money (since we don’t have it to spend) from China?  That’s right.  We have an annual trade deficit with China expected to hit over $120 billion dollars this year, and China is using that surplus to fund loans to cover our debt.  We now owe over $125 billion to communist China to fund our national debt.  $52 billion in loans from China were added in this year alone.  There has been a balanced spending bill (a law that says Congress can’t spend more than they take in) in the House for over 3 years that the speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert refuses to let come up for a vote.  The Republican controlled Congress, with Bush’s signature, has bumped our debt by over a trillion dollars in one year.  Now that the economy is starting to recover on it’s own, (the tax cuts can’t be the reason since they are hardly even starting to kick in) there is no responsible logic in leaving the remaining 10 years of tax cuts in place while we borrow from China to pay for them.  Yes you heard it right; we are borrowing money from China and other countries to pay for the tax cuts.  I don’t want to leave that debt as a legacy to my children.  If you want lower taxes you need to reduce spending.  Duh.

Say what you want about Bill Clinton, but the guy did balance the budget and eliminate the deficit.  It appears to me that what is going on is that besides swaying key votes the Republicans are funding everything they think would be a popular Democratic election issue, such as drug benefits for seniors (which isn’t even in these figures yet), in order to defuse as much ammunition as they can from presidential contenders.  It may work and bring them otherwise Democratic voters, but is the cost something we can afford with our looming national debt?  This is something we should hear more about during next year’s campaign.

These spending excesses are sickening to anyone even halfway fiscally conservative, but especially now given the huge cost of the war in Iraq and the huge recent run up in the deficit.  Historically, discretionary spending has decreased during times of war.  My friend Kevin has always had what I think is the best idea, it ought to be illegal to attach spending measures, also known as “earmarks” to an unrelated bill in order to get votes for the main measure.  Those special projects should be required to stand up to scrutiny on an individual basis.

To make matters worse, what is becoming a common practice recently is that instead of granting funding requests to an agency who would sort out grant recipients on a competitive basis, these pork projects are being funded directly to the recipient which by-passes the agencies who normally would oversee the award process.  The recipients are getting better “connected” to Washington with lobbyists, and this has created a boom in the “lobby industry”, as well as Republican campaign contributions.

We are not talking about a few projects here and there, all in all there are 9,362 such individual funding earmarks in the 2003 budget.  Here are just a few examples.

$325,000 Construction of a swimming pool in Salinas, California

$200,000 Advanced Traffic Analysis Center, North Dakota

$250,000 Nevada Test Site Oral History Project

$90,000 Rabbit Run Community Arts Association, Madison, Ohio

$150,000 Renovation off Farmers market, Dallas, Texas

$220,000 New Mexico Retail Association, Albuquerque, New Mexico

$400,000 Davenport Music History Museum, Davenport, Iowa

$270,000 Sustainable olive production

$180,000 Seafood waste research, Fairbanks, Alaska

$2,000,000 Parents Anonymous

There are over NINE THOUSAND (930 times as many as I listed) of these sorts of projects in one year alone.  These idiots are going spending crazy!!  This may be the most fiscally irresponsible government we have ever had.  I guess we will have to bring in another Democratic President to get us back on track.

Write or email Senator Nelson and Hagel, ask them why they thought that Nebraskans should help pay $500,000 for updated traffic lights in New Rochelle NY.  I wonder if they even knew about everything they voted for.