In the past, I’ve often panned congressional pork.
Now I say, ban the pork. It’s time to be a lean, mean, fighting machine. Let’s get serious about this war against terrorism and for freedom and self-responsibility. Let’s get rid of porkbarrel legislation altogether.
Let’s make pork illegal.
Pork is a state or local project that has no relationship whatever to national defense or law enforcement, nor fulfills a federal mandate. The benefits of porkbarrel are local and, in the best of all possible worlds, so would the payments be. Assuming local taxpayers still want to foot the bill once they realize they’re stuck with it.
Pork gets on the budget to begin with only because of logrolling and back-scratching, not because it fulfills a true federal obligation of the government.
Tom Schatz of Citizens Against Government Waste says it’s time for a little patriotic restraint on the part of pork-barreling career politicians. It’s time for our congressmen to say things like, “I will sacrifice the $3.5 million I have requested to restore the statue of Vulcan in Alabama to pay for three Tomahawk cruise missiles.”
I agree, but I go further. It’s time for Congress to ban pork altogether. Make a law and not as a temporary wartime measure, but permanently. As long as it’s legal for the whole nation to be forced to pay for a bridge in Ohio or a park bench in Madison, Wisconsin, it is going to happen. So let’s ban it.
Our federal government should be providing for the national defense, not the local latrines.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.