Do You Care Why Pigs Stink?

I find it hard to believe that someone actually sat and wondered why pigs stink. But evidently, someone did. And he wrote a bill that actually made it to Congress. And now you and I must pay $1.7 Million to find out why pigs (and manure) stink! What is this world coming to?

This year in the midst of a financial crisis no less, the amount of pork in this year’s appropriations bill, passed this week, stinks to high heaven. Literally.

The New York Post reports, for example, that Congress has allocated $1.7 million for “swine odor and manure management research.”

How appropriate.

Senator Daniel Inouye, a longtime veteran of the Senate, managed to get the Polynesian Voyaging Society of Honolulu $238,000. For what? So it can organize “sea voyages in ancient-style sailing canoes like the ones that first brought settlers to Hawaii.”

That’s a great use of taxpayer money in the midst of what the White House is calling the most challenging economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Now I listened to President Obama's speech this week. I heard him, with my own ears, say there were "no earmarks" in this so-called "stimulus" program. And yet, the group Taxpayers for Common Sense claims that the current appropriations bill contains a whopping 8,750 earmarks, at a cost of $7.7 billion.

When confronted with their profligate spending, Democratic leaders defended themselves, according to the Post, by asserting that “up to 40 percent of the earmarks” came from the hands of Republican legislators.

Earmarking is nothing but pure bribery in reverse. It’s a congressman’s or senator’s way of buying votes from the constituents back home.

The practice is an abomination. It violates the biblical understanding of the limited role of government—which is to preserve order and to promote justice—and it also rejects the principles on which our representative democracy was built.

I must be extremely naive, but I thought lawmaking was supposed to be about advancing the common good—not wheeling and dealing in order to hold on to power. The Founders built into the Constitution checks and balances, in the words the words of the Federalist Papers, “to pit ambition against ambition and make it impossible for any elements of government to obtain unchecked power.” But that’s precisely what we see happening with earmarks.

President Obama campaigned for change - "a change we can believe in." And he’s been preaching the virtue of fiscal responsibility. Well, he now has a unique opportunity to bring those about. Senator McCain has reportedly urged the President to veto this pile of pork.

And I agree. What better way to signal real, substantial change in Washington than by vetoing a massive appropriations bill filled with earmarks?

If you agree with me, let the President and your legislators know we really do want change in Washington—and that means no more earmarks. I doubt there are very few people who care why pigs stink. How about you?

(c) 2009 April Lorier