The Other Red Meat

For some people, pork isn't white meat--it's the red meat of politics. List some funny sounding programs, use the fatty metaphors of pork, and you get yourself some political attention.

Look at the omnibus spending bill and all those pork projects. Sure, in a better world they would go through a sensible process of evaluation. But Congress isn't very often about sensible processes. Many of the programs inserted in this bill were for relatively small projects of particular local significance. They are often if not mostly public sector projects, like bike trails, which not only improve health (cutting down healthcare costs) but aid local redevelopment.

Or they are scientific research projects. They may sound funny, like volcano research, honeybee research, termite research--some of those mentioned in the usual list for this bill, for instance in this column. But look at the first comments: there are good reasons for this research, even if it isn't immediately obvious. Sure, some are bad--the ones that give money to already rich businesses. But many perform a public good. And despite what the bloviators say, they employ people. Even if those people are young scientists with huge student loans.

And according to yet another article, here are some of the other awful pork this bill pays for:

Among the many earmarks are $485,000 for a boarding school for at-risk native students in western Alaska and $1.2 million for Helen Keller International so the nonprofit can provide eyeglasses to students with poor vision. There's also dozens of projects awarding state and local governments money for police equipment and to combat methamphetamine."

How terrible! Larding it up with boarding school for at-risk Native kids! Glasses for kids with poor vision! How can we let Congress get away with this?

Some of the hypocrites crying over this pork made sure to insert some of their own. Others don't bat an eye at hundreds of billions for useless weapons systems, or no-bid contracts to the Halliburtons and Blackwaters that amount to grand theft on an immense scale, sustained year after year. The biggest pork barrels on the planet have been called Iraq and Homeland Security. But as long as it involves explosives and not honeybees, then it's vital to the national interest.

Meanwhile, this horrible bill spends money on:

Agriculture _ $20.5 billion, including a 14 percent boost over 2008 for the popular WIC program that feeds infants and poor women.
Education _ $66.5 billion, a 7 percent increase over 2008 levels.
Energy _ $27 billion, including a $765 million, 54 percent hike for advanced energy research.
Health and Human Services _ $66.3 billion, including $30.3 billion for health research.
Housing and Urban Development _ $41.5 billion, including $24.5 billion for low-income and American Indian housing.
Labor _ $15.3 billion, including a 5 percent increase for employment and training programs."

Health research when the cost of healthcare is zooming into the stratosphere? Low income housing when millions are unemployed and losing their homes? Feeding infants and poor women? Oink Oink!

If the Republicans truly believed in cutting spending, they had eight years to prove it--and all they did was turn a Clinton surplus into a massive Bush debt. They have no credibility and no shame. In a time of national economic emergency, they play petty politics. Even Tom Friedman has noticed: "Economically, this is the big one. This is August 1914. This is the morning after Pearl Harbor. This is 9/12. Yet, in too many ways, we seem to be playing politics as usual." And Washington media continues to cooperate with this selfish short-sightedness.

President Obama has provided a sensible program for controlling earmarks. But let's not pretend this is actually about pork. It's about getting people upset enough to write checks to your campaign. It's about red meat. And it's about betraying your country in its time of peril.