The New Highway Bill: No Pork Left Behind No Pork Left Behind http://www.techcentralstation.com/081205D.html Veronique de Rugy 08/12/2005 Congress is frequently like a self-centered toddler who couldn't care less about the welfare of others. The transportation bill is the best example of that. The bill is two years overdue, billions of dollars higher than the President wanted and loaded with the kind of legislative projects that congressmen love to bring home to constituents at the expense of American taxpayers. Sadly, like a weak parent giving in to a child's temper tantrum, the President gave up what was left of his credibility as a fiscal conservative and signed the bill. For two years now, the President has spoken about the need to be firm and to impose spending restraints on Congress. The White House repeatedly said he would veto any bill whose cost would exceed $284 billion -- a number that is much larger than the previous highway bill and thus hardly a benchmark of fiscal responsibility. In the end, the bill spends $2 billion above what Bush proposed. But Congress included an $8.5 billion "rescission" of past budget authority, a gimmick that essentially masks the total cost of the bill. Yet even with this flagrant disregard of White House veto threats, President Bush signed the bill. The President's staff claims that this should be seen as the victory of fiscal conservatism over wasteful spending. Sure, they say, the final number is several $billion too high, but it is more important to focus on how much worse it could have been. Don Young, the Alaskan republican chairman of the House Transportation Committee, and other members wanted a more expansive $375 billion authorization bill. And this bill is $9 billion less than the Senate-passed version. In other words, the White House claims that it was aiming for restraint, it got it, so who cares about several billion dollars. The American taxpayers do. They are the ones footing the bill, mainly through an 18.3-cent-per-gallon excise tax on gasoline. Moreover, restraint is nowhere to be seen in this bill. It includes over $24.1 billion for 6,500 earmarked projects across the country that have been sought and won by individual Senators and House members. Politicians always engage in pork-barrel antics rather than allowing funding decisions to be made by the states, but the highway bill sets a new record for greed. Rep. Don Young, for instance, managed to get the 650,000 people in Alaska over 130 earmarked projects totaling nearly a billion dollars, including a $230 million dollar bridge to nowhere in Alaska which will be known now known as Don Young's Way. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas (R-CA) secured $600 million for his home district of Bakersfield in California while his state is getting over $2.2 billion. The Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert (R-IL), who did most of the heavy lifting for the bill, did pretty well for himself and especially for his hometown of Aurora, Illinois where the President signed the bill. Aurora is getting at least $7 million worth of pork barrel projects while the state of Illinois will get over $1.2 billion of taxpayers' money, $500 million of which is due to the Speaker's strong-arm tactics. The redistribution of taxpayer money among the states is based on political pull rather than objective need. Some states get swindled from the federal money-go-round year after year in terms of federal taxes paid versus federal spending received. By comparing taxes paid by residents of each state to data on federal spending by state, you find that states such as Florida and Texas routinely get less than 90 cents on every dollar sent to Washington while Alaska gets more than $5 dollars. There is nothing like a transportation bill to get congressmen dreaming about their reelection campaign. They immediately imagine themselves standing at a ribbon cutting ceremony for a new highway and a new bridge that they've helped secure. Never mind, of course, that these jobs are paid with money taken away from taxpayers who need it to pay for their kids' school tuition, to make a mortgage payment, or to pay a hospital bill. President Bush has been a big spender in the Lyndon Johnson tradition and he has cemented this unfortunate reputation by signing this transportation bill loaded with wasteful spending and budget gimmicks that hide the true cost from taxpayers.
Jonathan Weisman of Washington Post on C-SPAN this morning said the way (or the procedure) this transportation bill was voted was that if you (a member of the House or Committee) don't vote for the bill, you don't get the fund for the project in your district (or state), so in the end, almost everybody voted for it. I am not saying we should not spend on improving our highway and other transportation systems, but the money should be prioritized, and allocated based on merits. Again this is a case of redistribution of the wealth to the special interests. The Republican and Democrat members of the Congress are both guilty of mis managing tax payers' dollars. http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/12356078.htm Manifold 'earmarks' ride in on transit bill By Jonathan Weisman and Jim VandeHei WASHINGTON POST WASHINGTON - Three years ago, President Bush went to war against congressional pork. His official 2003 budget even featured a color photo of a wind-powered ice sled -- an example of the pet projects and alleged boondoggles he said he would no longer tolerate. Wednesday, Bush effectively signed a cease-fire -- critics called it more like a surrender -- in his war on pork. He signed into law a $286 billion transportation measure that contains a record 6,371 pet projects inserted by members of Congress from both parties. At a short bill-signing event in Montgomery, Ill., Bush said the new law will allow the United States to modernize highways and roads in a fiscally responsible manner. "I'm proud to be here to sign this transportation bill, because our economy depends on us having the most efficient, reliable transportation system in the world," Bush said at a Caterpillar Inc. manufacturing plant. Bush brushed aside pleas from taxpayer groups to veto the bill, which exceeded the $284 billion limit that he had vowed not to cross. The vast majority of the measure is geared toward road construction and public transit projects, with the money doled out over five years according to formulas designed to provide state and local governments considerable flexibility, Transportation Department officials said. But hundreds of millions of dollars will be channeled to programs that critics say have nothing to do with improving congestion or efficiency: $2.3 million for the beautification of the Ronald W. Reagan Freeway in Southern California; $6 million for graffiti elimination in New York; nearly $4 million on the National Packard Museum in Warren, Ohio, and the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.; $2.4 million on a Red River National Wildlife Refuge Visitor Center in Louisiana; and $1.2 million to install lighting and steps and to equip an interpretative facility at the Blue Ridge Music Center, to name a few. "There are nearly 6,500 member-requested projects worth more than $24 billion, nearly nine percent of the total spending," executives from six taxpayer and conservative groups complained in a letter to Bush urging that he use his veto pen for the first time. They noted that Reagan vetoed a transportation bill in 1987 because there were 152 such special requests, known in the parlance of congressional budgeting as "earmarks." White House spokesman Trent Duffy replied that Bush pressured Congress to shave billions of dollars off the bill, and he said spending is "pretty modest" when spread out over five years. The transportation bill, at $57 billion a year, is a fraction of Medicare's $265 billion. Besides, Duffy said, "the president has to work with the Congress." But this is a significant shift from Bush's once-uncompromising stand on earmarks, which he said stymie experts in the federal agencies who otherwise could prioritize projects and fund only the most deserving. "Across the spectrum of transportation programs, congressional earmarks undercut the (Transportation) Department's ability to fund projects that have successfully proved their merits," the White House's glossy 2003 budget proposal declared, in one of several passages decrying such spending. The wind-powered ice sled lampooned in the budget was for the sheriff of Ashland County, Wis. As it turned out, the funding had been secured by Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., after an Ashland teenager fell through the ice of Lake Superior and drowned as sheriff's deputies, firefighters and his father watched helplessly from shore. The controversy illuminated a timeless truth of budget politics: What looks like frivolous spending to some eyes never looks that way to the people who requested it.
