Category — pork barrel spending

President-elect Obama’s promises to create budgetary savings by eliminating waste.  Let me start out by saying this goal conflicts with the earlier hints coming from his team that we need a huge FDR style budget busting stimulus.  Additionally, it looks a lot like Deval Patrick’s promises when he became governor, and like his friend Governor Patrick, it’ll go nowhere when the rubber meets the legislature.  The Pelosi/Reid Congress couldn’t even get the origional TARP done without a hefty load of earmarks and that bill was supposedly needed to avoid a financial Pearl Harbor.

I’ll remind the president-elect, as John McCain should have during the debates, that he doesn’t have a line item veto.  Therefore, I wish him loads of luck in finding the wasted billions, but it won’t do him much good since Congress controls the purse strings.  There’s not a snowballs chance in hell that he gets his party to comply with its 2006 promise to cut earmarks and pork.

The House rubber stamped the Senate’s bailout today.  Why did they initially fail to act on what Warren Buffett described as a “financial Pearl Harbor”?  The first bill didn’t have billions in earmarks.  Add some pork and suddenly all the swine want to feed at the trough.  It’s a good thing we didn’t have this rogues gallery during Pearl Harbor.  They wouldn’t have declared war on the Axis Powers without a few payouts.