Who doesn’t love pork?
The Iowa State Fair ran from August 12-22 this year. Iowa, in the heart of America’s heartland, is the largest pork producing state in the nation. One of the most popular “Fair Foods” at the Iowa State Fair is pork on a stick, known in the other 49 states as a bone-in pork chop.
As it turns out, Washington DC is also a major producer of pork— but not the kind you might find at the Iowa State Fair. The pork that comes from Washington is also known as pork-barrel legislation. It’s a form of political patronage where government funds are allocated to projects designed to please voters or legislators and win votes—and it’s incredibly wasteful.
The Democrat-controlled Congress has been busy this year. In February, they passed the “American Rescue Plan”, a package of COVID relief legislation that contained $1.9 trillion in new government spending.
Only 9% of this bill went towards vaccine procurement and distribution.
The other 91% went to various pet projects of politicians across the country.
Some went to help bail out broken pension programs in failed states, a large portion went to need-blind Direct Financial Payments (aka Biden Bucks), and other dollars went towards off-topic projects like building a bridge between New York and Ontario.
More recently, the Senate approved a $1 trillion infrastructure bill. This is yet another example of how Washington DC is working hard to spread Pork across the country. The bill allocates $66 billion to subsidize Amtrak and keep it from going the way of the dinosaur. Even the funds dedicated to more widely used transportation infrastructure, like highways, include waste. The infrastructure package’s highway allocations include $50 million per year to combat weeds and $2 million per year for bee-friendly landscaping.
Thank God Congress didn’t exclude the bees from this gravy train!
From George Washington through Bill Clinton, 42 Presidents and over 100 Congresses accumulated $6 trillion of debt on the national balance sheet. Bush (43), Obama, and Trump each added to the national debt in their own spectacular fashion, taking the US national debt to just shy of $28 trillion on the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration.
For those keeping score at home, this Congress has approved $3 trillion in spending so far this year. In late August, the House cleared the way for a $3.5 trillion spending plan to further advance President Biden’s “Build Back Better” program.
To put that in perspective, Washington DC liberals are spending the equivalent of 42 Presidents worth of debt in less than a year. Sadly, a large chunk of that money is going to pork.
In the late ’80s, the National Pork Board embarked on their “the other white meat” marketing campaign as part of an effort to appeal to heart-healthy Americans opting for leaner poultry and pork over beef. Washington’s pork couldn’t be more different. It’s making beltway insiders fat and putting America’s financial health in jeopardy. We’d all be better off if the pork coming out of Washington were more like the pork coming from Iowa – lean and nutritious.
If you’d like to see DC politicians take a leaf out of Iowa’s book, consider joining We The People in taking a stand against wasteful practices like pork-barrel legislation. Please support our work by donating today.