Tiny Oink
It’s that time of year again — tax time, when everyone’s talking about government waste.
The Citizens Against Government Waste have released their 2005 Congressional Pig Book in which they detail 27.3 billion dollars of government spending that they deem to be a waste.
No doubt, they are correct. Every time a piece of legislation passes it seems that someone has tacked on an irrelevant amendment that spends our money in the most frivilous of manners.
And $27.3 billion is indeed a lot of money. I’d have to win a lot of lotteries to make that kind of dough.
But consider this: pork is a way of mollifying voters back home, and is thus a way to line up coalitions in our divided nation. The president’s proposed budget for 2005 was $2.4 trillion.
In other words, about 1.1% of our spending went to grease the wheels of government. Even if we only consider the budget for discretionary spending (which was $818 billion), pork accounts for only 3.3%.
A small price to pay in my opinion, even if CAGW disagrees.
I don’t care how much they waste because I accept that there is nothing I can do to stop it, and I want MY state to get some pork too.
However, every part of the budget is potential pork, not just CAGW hits or discretionary spending. Every dollar allocated nationally is still spent locally somewhere, and often in a difficult-to-trace manner.
That being said, every expenditure by the Federal Government on South Carolina is clearly just good stewardship by our glorious leaders.