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Editorial: Smell of Pork Again Wafting from Capitol
San Antonio Express-News
March 29, 2007
A good gauge of the profligacy of Congress is the size of the annual "Pig Book," a publication of watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste that documents pork in federal spending.
By that measure, the current Democrat-led Congress has thus far failed to deliver the bacon with as much alacrity as its GOP-led predecessors.
Last year's "Pig Book" identified 9,963 pork barrel projects in the budget at a record cost to taxpayers of $29 billion. Congress larded up appropriations bills with $500,000 for a teapot museum in Sparta, N.C.; and $13.5 million for the International Fund for Ireland, which included funding for the World Toilet Summit.
The 2007 edition finds a relatively skimpy 2,658 wasteful or inappropriate expenditures with a price tag of $13.2 billion. And while that may sound like an impressive reduction, a couple of caveats are in order.
First, the 109th Congress passed only two of 11 appropriations measures for fiscal year 2007 before it adjourned in December. Fiscal conservatives led by Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Jim DeMint, R-S.C., blocked a last-minute bid to pass the nine remaining pork-laden appropriations. So a simple year-over-year comparison doesn't provide an accurate picture.
Second, the new Democratic appropriations chairmen, Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia and Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin, pledged a one-year moratorium on spending bill earmarks. That eliminated as many as 7,000 pork projects contained in the nine uncompleted appropriations bills.
But the appropriators have already begun to backslide on that pledge in a big way. Both versions of the emergency supplemental spending bill passed by the House and Senate during the past week for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan pack in as much as $24 billion for unrelated, domestic projects.
As the Chinese calendar suggests, 2007 may yet turn out to be the Year of the Pig.
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