Word: pork-barrel
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Your report on the courageous efforts of common citizens around the world to fight appalling diseases in the poorest countries [Nov. 7] should be required reading for all. I especially recommend it to members of Congress. Instead of funding pork-barrel projects, why not finance completion of the malaria vaccine? As a health-care worker, I was astonished to read how far development of the vaccine has progressed. We have a golden opportunity to eliminate the disease...
...House spending bill does absolutely nothing to reduce the deficit while inflicting great harm on the poor. Even within the bill, there are provisions for $35 billion in new spending, including giveaways to dairy farmers and doctors—a symptom of Congress’s dangerous addiction to pork-barrel spending. Instead of seeking to cut much needed social spending, House Republicans should look to excise their propensity for earmarks, which produced $24 billion in pork in the recent highway bill alone. Instead of building the “Bridge to Nowhere” in Alaska, Congress could continue...
Business leaders are losing patience with Sanford's vetoes of budget items like trade centers and tourism marketing. Even G.O.P. bosses charge that he is worse at economic development than at grandstanding, as when he visited the legislature last year carrying piglets to protest what he considered pork-barrel spending...
...consistently avoiding any semblance of a clash of ideas, the Bush administration has evacuated the content from their claims to conservatism, leaving only an empty husk of special interests, a coalition of hungry lobbyists looking for corporate handouts and Senators at the trough of pork-barrel politics. Most conservatives never liked Bush’s hallmark “compassionate conservatism” catchphrase—does it mean that real conservatism is heartless?—but there was always hope that somewhere, buried beneath the steel tariffs and bloated highway bills, there was a core of actual philosophy...
...will we pay for it? Democrats say President George W. Bush should consider increasing taxes on the wealthy, while some Republicans, including Arizona Senator John McCain, want lawmakers to cut back on pork-barrel spending. But Congress is highly unlikely to achieve either goal. Instead, Washington is expected to continue borrowing money without finding ways to pay for it. The bulk of the rebuilding costs will probably show up in next year's budget deficit, which was estimated--pre-Katrina--to exceed $314 billion...