Word: pork-barrel
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...Infrastructure is an ugly word - unless the bridge you take to work just collapsed. In politics, it has become a euphemism for pork-barrel spending. In the pre-Newt era of Democratic congressional dominance, it smacked of payoffs to big city machines and construction unions. That is one of the reasons Democratic candidates for President have soft-pedaled this basic governmental responsibility in the Reagan pendulum cycle. In the 2000 campaign, Al Gore proposed a new sort of infrastructure spending: a massive alternative-energy program - $15 billion a year for 10 years - to replace the country's dependence on fossil...
...frequently as he now talks about economic issues, his attempt to embrace two conservative economic models at once isn't helping his credibility. On the one hand, McCain argues for fiscal discipline, with his promises to end wasteful pork-barrel spending (which he mentioned five times during his appearance in Ohio). On the other, with his commitment to tax cuts, he embraces supply-side economics, which maintains that short-term deficits don't really matter...
...downtown Atlanta, is simple. But it should be a national project, a priority for government at the highest levels, something that voters actually hold politicians accountable for. John McCain and Barack Obama are feuding these days over what constitutes legitimate infrastructure spending and what is just pork-barrel spending. But it won't simply take money to fix Ground Zero. It will take leadership, lots of it. A full acknowledgment of the site's problems from the candidates would help...
...McCain is right about this. He's right that he has a far longer, far more substantive record of forging bipartisan consensus - and of resisting the demands of party loyalty - than does Obama. On the environment, energy policy, campaign finance, tobacco, torture, pork-barrel spending, immigration and more, McCain has repeatedly worked against his party or his President, or both. But the problem for McCain is that on the three issues that matter most to voters this year - the economy, health care and Iraq - it's hard to make the case that he is charting a course different from Bush...
...Senate, his campaign statements about the deficit have been less than convincing. He wants to extend the Bush tax cuts that he once opposed - and add a few more of his own, saying he'll make up the difference by cutting "wasteful spending." But even eliminating the pork-barrel congressional earmarks that McCain has long criticized would make only a dent in the deficit...