Mark Steyn on earmarks in the bail-out bill. An excerpt:
Now it turns out the once-in-a-lifetime save-the-global-economy emergency-measure has got time for all the business as usual. Well, which is it? I'm willing to be persuaded of the merits of a bill for "wool research", or the merits of a billion-trillion-gazillion-dollar bill to save the planet from economic meltdown. But the same piece of legislation cannot plausibly contain both.
I suppose sophisticated insiders would assure me that regrettably there's no possibility of earmark reform; this is just the price of doing business in Washington. But that's why non-sophisticated non-insiders hold the political class in contempt. The same blowhards who run for office on a platform of lowering ocean levels and healing the planet then turn around and insist they're unable to do anything about the one small area of human endeavor for which they bear sole responsibility.
2 comments:
Odd thing those porky earmarks
There was a procedural problem in the Senate; they cannot vote on a funding bill until after the House does. The House failed to vote for the bill, so they grabbed an old bill (that had already passed by a wide margin and not related to the bailout) and added the Bailout bill as an ammendment. The original bill had the pork ...
So it goes to show how much wool is pulled over our eyes by Congress.
I particularly liked the aged pork of "wooden arrows for children"
Cromagnum,
The wooden arrows one was my favorite. Government as vending machine.
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