PORKBUSTER WATCH

Here's what I suspect and why: I was going to do my part in PorkBusters so I went to Tax Payers for Common Sense, pulled down the appropriations link, and looked for the Pork in my city. Guess what? Zero. Zippo. Nada. I think that when a congressman gets a huge amount of money for a pork project he agrees to support others for a period of time without requesting more for himself for a while. My city fucked the U.S. Taxpayers out of nearly a billion dollars for a "street improvement" on a State Highway that runs through the center of town. This project took nearly five years and inconvenienced everybody. Businesses had to close down and many had to leave the city because customers couldn't enter. What we got out of your money is a couple of miles of crummy trees on each side of the street, new sidewalks, new drainage, and within a mile and a half of high end restaurants and stores, you guys gave us a median strip of grass (not the smoking kind) and a widened street. I think our guy (Henry Waxman, he of AIDS research and Smoking is Bad) simply made a deal whereby he would request zero for a while. I then started to check parts of LA close to me. Guess what I found? HiWay improvements, Freeway repair, a Children's Hospital research grant, sewer improvements, and stuff like that. Getting rid of "pork" just ain't that easy because so much of it is necessary (you can argue that if it is so necessary the city should pay for it). Only in rural areas can you find the awful Pork. I used to live in the now mega millionaire hang out of the Monterey Peninsula of California. Now there is where Pork-a- Plenty is spent. 400K for a nature trail, 150K for aquarium improvement, and plenty of shit like that. I think that most useless spending is done in sparsely populated areas. Especially sparsely populated areas where rich people who want low taxes live. Anyway just my thought.