Word: pork-barrel
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...schools was less than $1,000 until 1966; tuition alone was less than $1,000 until 1985. The understanding was that states would charge a student only about a tenth of the actual cost of educating him or her in a public university. State universities were fantastically good politics: pork-barrel construction projects and middle-class entitlement programs rolled into one. Most states committed large portions of their budgets to subsidizing their universities...
Yeltsin uses another tactic to calm the anger he encounters--an immediate dispensation of funds. In the U.S. such pork-barrel spending is usually hidden in a maze of worthwhile legislation. In Russia, Yeltsin earmarks billions of rubles with abandon. In just the past several weeks he has signed a decree giving a $5 billion subsidy to farmers and has said commercial electricity rates will be cut in half. Those big items are ruinous enough, but Yeltsin's aversion to fiscal sanity goes further. In Yaroslavl, for example, he pledged $700,000 to house veterans of the Afghanistan...
...WASHINGTON OUT TO CUT federal spending, 12-term Congressman Bud Shuster is an unrepentant pork-barrel spender. Now it appears the chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee has converts. More than half his House colleagues--including a hefty majority of those reform-minded G.O.P. freshmen--are backing a bill that would lift constraints on highway and airport projects. If the Truth in Budgeting Act is passed by the House next week, it would give Shuster's committee great latitude to tap some $33 billion in transportation trust funds...
...ONLY WE HAD THE LINE-ITEM VETO. FOR YEARS--decades, actually--that wish has been a mantra. Editorial writers, good-government groups and all modern Presidents have wanted to give the Chief Executive the power to comb bloated budget bills and X out the most nonsensical portions, notably the pork-barrel provisions that members of Congress trade among themselves. In fact, straight-shooting members of Congress have been trying to give Presidents this authority since 1876. Forty-three state Governors have had it for years. Now, finally, the call is being answered. Last week the House and Senate approved...
...much of the information supplied by the doubles dealt with Russian aircraft, missile and radar capabilities. But Pentagon officials are privately dubious that they'll be able to pin billions of dollars in waste on the CIA reports. The Defense Department squanders money on unneeded weapons mostly because of pork-barrel politics, interservice rivalries and lobbying by contractors...