Word: pork-barrel
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...Flintridge, Calif., from a 10% excise tax. Despite Metzenbaum's guard, a few yuletide goodies may slip into law, including a $500,000 chimpanzee colony for New Mexico State University. Not that the issue is just fish bait and monkeys. Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker's notorious pork-barrel project, the $3.6 billion Clinch River breeder reactor, was voted continued funding...
Howard Baker seems the perfect Government representative. But when the cuts concern his pork-barrel projects, like the Clinch River breeder reactor, he is not asking as much of himself as he does of other Senators. Baker may be a shepherd in party matters, but he is a wolf when legislation threatens Tennessee...
Baker's weaknesses as a national leader are in some ways outgrowths of his strengths. His affection for pork-barrel projects for the folks back home seems particularly inappropriate for someone trying to shepherd a budget-cutting revolution through Congress. The most egre gious example is the Clinch River breeder reactor, a costly ($3.2 billion) boondoggle that both Jimmy Carter and, initially, Ronald Reagan tried to scuttle. Baker was "in every direction" trying to win votes for this pet project, says Senator Lugar. Baker, a former member of the old Atomic Energy Committee, says he truly believes in breeder...
...politicians' commitment to nukes seems to spring from three sources. One is simple pork-barrel politics. Clinch River's two main backers are Tennessee's powerful Republican, senator. Howard Baker, and Congressman Lloyd Bouquard (D-Tenn.), whose district stands to lose jobs if the project shuts down. Another motive seems to be the romanticization of high technology, an irrational love of complexity for its own sake, that ignores nuclear power's evident flaws. This attitude is reflected both in Reagan's vision of remaking America into an "industrial giant" and in many representatives' fears that we might "fall behind...
...even go beyond the political damage to Ronald Reagan. A close reading of Stockman's remarks reveals what the most cynical political observers have always maintained: that political expediency, not theory or fair-minded, judgment, dictates the shaping of economic policy. Stockman painted a lurid picture of unprincipled compromise, pork-barrel greed, and cowardice in the face of interest group pressure. As he neatly summed it up. Washington is a place where it doesn't make too much sense to "believe in the momentum theory...I believe in institutional inertia. Two months of response can't beat fifteen years...