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Gaming the dead or porking our safety

Six weeks after the bridge collapse in Minneapolis and probably before all the bodies have been found our US Senate has answered and risen to the moment with a “transportation” bill loaded with at least $2 billion in pork spending earmarked for Senator’s pet projects back home.

This is a favorite tactic, load up bills that have a sense of urgency to them, such as National Defense or a Federal response to a natural disaster with all sorts of pet projects that have virtually nothing to do with the urgent matter at hand.

What Senator is going to vote against this bill? If they do they will be labeled at the next election as “voting to neglect our vital infrastructure”. What Senator wants that label?

Which why the gamers of the dead load up these bills with just enough pork to get by and still deliver the goods.

USA Today

the Senate approved a transportation and housing bill Wednesday containing at least $2 billion for pet projects that include a North Dakota peace garden, a Montana baseball stadium and a Las Vegas history museum.

That’s not the half of it.

Total spending on transportation “earmarks” next year is likely to be about $8 billion, when legislative projects from a previously approved, five-year highway bill are factored in. A newly released report by the Department of Transportation’s inspector general identified 8,056 earmarks totaling $8.5 billion in the fiscal year that ended in October, or 13.5% of the Transportation Department’s $63 billion spending plan.

……

The Federal Aviation Administration, for example, had to delay updating high-priority air-traffic control towers in favor of lower priority facilities requested by legislators, the inspector general found.

 

How long are we going to tolerate this?  Time to write our Congress_Servants and tell them it is ok to veto bills such as this.

One Response to “Gaming the dead or porking our safety”

1. bbuckley Says:
   September 15th, 2007 at 10:04 am

   Agreed but forget the earmarks — even the urgent matter at hand itself is almost never the business of the Federal Government.

   The economic analysis in “Flying Pork Barrels” terrific (http://www.slate.com/?id=116288).

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