Trackbacked at The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, basil’s blog:
From The Washington Times:
Two Republican senators say they will force their colleagues to vote on the Senate floor on each so-called pork-barrel spending project this year, and President Bush also called for reforms to rein in the projects.
The battle over earmarks — the line-item projects that members of Congress insert into spending bills to benefit their districts — has ballooned as Republicans debate congressional reforms and budget deficits.
Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma sent a letter Wednesday night to their colleagues announcing they will use Senate rules to force members to vote on each project.
“American taxpayers are entitled to a more thorough debate and disclosure about how their money is being spent,” the senators wrote.
There were a record 13,997 projects in the 13 appropriations bills that constitute the discretionary portion of the federal budget for fiscal 2005, costing taxpayers $27.3 billion. These earmarks are an appropriation in circumvention of established budgetary procedures.
These earmarks are normally:
- Requested by only one chamber of Congress
- Not specifically authorized
- Not competitively awarded
- Not requested by the President
- Greatly exceeds the President’s budget request or the previous year’s funding
- Not the subject of congressional hearings
- Serves only a local or special interest, usually with the goal of getting the member of Congress re-elected
Read that last one again, and you’ll see why pork-barrel spending projects are deemed “mandatory” for Congress. Members of Congress get a $162,000 paycheck every year (or, about four times the average paycheck in the US), not to mention all the perks and privileges that come with the office. After getting elected to office once you quickly learn that your sole driving force in life is then to get re-elected.
If you can build some stupid bridge or monument in your district using money from another district then your chances of re-election are good. And pork is born.
I challenge any of you that pay taxes to visit Citizens Against Government Waste. There you will find tons of information about wasteful spending of YOUR money by your elected officials – the ones YOU ELECTED.
Will McCain and Coburn make any difference? Time will tell. And I will watch.
pork-barrel, earmarks, McCain, Coburn, taxpayer
1 response so far ↓
1 Crazy Politico // Jan 31, 2006 at 8:49 pm
I would love to see this happen. I’d also love to see them ban the addition of pork to the annual “reconcilliation bills”, which normally have about 5% reconcilliation, and 95% BS.