Republican Pork the size of an Elephant! My conservative friends all cry about the government spending money foolishly but they refuse to acknowledge since gaining control of congress how irresponsible their Republican representatives have been with spending ALL our money.


April 16, 2004
Pork, Sweet and Sour

The Congressional practice of dipping into the public trough to finance projects that benefit only a single legislator is so firmly established that most people yawn when they see the words "pork-barrel spending." Yet every so often a project comes along with such a grotesquely negative cost-benefit ratio that even the most cynical citizen snaps awake.

So it is with Representative Don Young of Alaska and his two bridges to nowhere. Both bridges are included in the national highway bill recently approved by the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, which is led by Mr. Young. One would connect the depressed town of Ketchikan in southeastern Alaska with an island one mile away. The island has 50 residents and a small airport. The other bridge, two miles long, would connect Anchorage with a small port that has one regular tenant.

The total cost of the two bridges is estimated at $2.2 billion. On their face, they make no sense in transportation terms — the Ketchikan ferry, for example, does just fine. And while the projects will create hundreds of temporary construction jobs, it is hard to imagine any enduring economic benefits. It might be cheaper just to pay everybody several years' salary.

This kind of madness also gives pork an unnecessarily bad name. Many of the personal "earmarks" that legislators stuff into the annual spending bills are perfectly worthy items that simply haven't made it up to the top of any priorities list. Constituents expect their representatives to push them forward. But that is no excuse for the stinkers that would make any taxpayer weep. If individual legislators cannot exercise discipline, the public has a right to expect Congress to impose it.

Some pork fails the most elementary smell test. January's catchall appropriations bill, for instance, included a $500,000 grant for a program at the University of Akron called, with unintended humor, Exercises in Hard Choices, which examines how Congress makes budget decisions. Besides Mr. Young's bridges, the highway bill includes other items with only the faintest relationship to the nation's transportation needs, including $3.5 million for horse trails in Virginia and $1.5 million for the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.

The energy bill is no better. Particularly offensive is a "green bonds" program offering subsidized loans to any project that can demonstrate even the flimsiest connection to the country's energy needs. Among these is a $150 million riverfront development in Shreveport, La., that will offer shops, clubs and a Hooters restaurant but provide no obvious contribution to dealing with the country's energy problems beyond the fact that it will have lots of shade trees.

Some bad ideas simply refuse to die. The Senate booted Charles Grassley's proposal for a $50 million indoor rain forest in Iowa from the energy bill, despite his claims that it would produce $120 million in tourist dollars. Mr. Grassley then found a home for it in the omnibus appropriations bill.

Somewhere between the good things and the outrageous waste lie the impressive-sounding projects involving experimental technologies that may or may not pan out. The energy bill authorizes not one but three speculative projects aimed at turning plant matter into fuel, but the biggest bet may be the $800 million coal gasification plant awarded to Norm Coleman, a Minnesota senator whose vote was much needed during last year's debate on the bill. This plant could unlock the secret of how to burn coal in ways that do not harm the atmosphere. Or it could turn out to be another in a shamefully long line of "clean coal" boondoggles, which benefit nobody but the coal industry.

Even without asking legislators to give up lobbying for hometown projects, one can hope for more restraint, particularly in a Congress supposedly dominated by fiscal conservatives. As it stands, the current appropriations process is looking like one very expensive bridge to nowhere.




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