BS: Repubs Mug Taxpayers Again...

Subject: BS: Repubs Mug Taxpayers Again...
From: Bobert
Date: 15 Aug 05 - 05:10 PM

My, my, my...

If last week's Energy Bill wasn't pork laden enough fir ya, now we have a transpotation bill with over 6,000 special interst pork barrel projects!?!?!?!?.....

Ahhhhh, have any these crooks actually sat thru an Intro to Economics course???

Nevrmind...

Bobert

Subject: RE: BS: Repubs Mug Taxpayers Again...
From: GUEST
Date: 15 Aug 05 - 06:01 PM

.......with a large percentage going to West Virginia.
Is that Senator a Repub also?

Subject: RE: BS: Repubs Mug Taxpayers Again...
From: Ebbie
Date: 15 Aug 05 - 06:13 PM

Alaska got a big chunk of it too- mostly for two projects that most of the citizens don't even want. One is a multi-dollar bridge that will connect its 54 citizens to the mainland. They say thty don't want it, but the Governor, who used to live in the area, says they do.

Subject: RE: BS: Repubs Mug Taxpayers Again...
From: Bobert
Date: 15 Aug 05 - 06:15 PM

Like how large a percentage, GUEST?

Are you aware that since Robert Byrd criticised Bush that many parts of the H-corrodore construction have come to a halt???

Like maybe you'd like to guess what stae is the biggest winner in the the recent money grabs???

Wes Virginia?

Nope, migth of fact Wes Ginny hasn't done all that well....

Maybe you'd like to research it and come back an' tell these fine folks which state raked in the most pork...

Subject: RE: BS: Repubs Mug Taxpayers Again...
From: pdq
Date: 15 Aug 05 - 07:11 PM

...here is the Washington Post's take on things...


But hundreds of millions of dollars will be channeled to programs that critics say have nothing to do with improving congestion or efficiency: $2.3 million for the beautification of the Ronald Reagan Freeway in California; $6 million for graffiti elimination in New York; nearly $4 million on the National Packard Museum in Warren, Ohio, and the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.; $2.4 million on a Red River National Wildlife Refuge Visitor Center in Louisiana; and $1.2 million to install lighting and steps and to equip an interpretative facility at the Blue Ridge Music Center, to name a few.

"There are nearly 6,500 member-requested projects worth more than $24 billion, nearly nine percent of the total spending," executives from six taxpayer and conservative groups complained in a letter to Bush urging that he use his veto pen for the first time. They noted that Reagan vetoed a transportation bill in 1987 because there were 152 such special requests, known in the parlance of congressional budgeting as "earmarks."

White House spokesman Trent Duffy replied that Bush pressured Congress to shave billions of dollars off the bill, and he said spending is "pretty modest" when spread out over five years. The transportation bill, at $57 billion a year, is a fraction of Medicare's $265 billion.

Besides, Duffy said, "the president has to work with the Congress."

But this is a significant shift from Bush's once-uncompromising stand on earmarks, which he said stymie experts in the federal agencies who otherwise could prioritize projects and fund only the most deserving. "Across the spectrum of transportation programs, congressional earmarks undercut the [Transportation] Department's ability to fund projects that have successfully proved their merits," the White House's glossy 2003 budget proposal declared, in one of several passages decrying such spending.

The wind-powered ice sled lampooned in the budget was for the sheriff of Ashland County, Wis. As it turned out, the funding had been secured by Rep. David R. Obey (D-Wis.), after an Ashland teenager fell through the ice of Lake Superior and drowned as sheriff's deputies, firefighters and his father watched helplessly from shore. The controversy illuminated a timeless truth of budget politics: What looks like frivolous spending to some eyes never looks that way to the people who requested it.

Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) was especially offended by a fanciful drawing in the 2003 budget portraying the executive branch as Jonathan Swift's Gulliver, "tied-up in a morass of Lilliputian do's and don'ts."

Byrd, who has been especially successful in steering money to his home state, angrily lectured then-Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill: "The Congress and certainly this Senate is not ordinary, and certainly not Lilliputian. We're senators."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Subject: RE: BS: Repubs Mug Taxpayers Again...
From: Bobert
Date: 15 Aug 05 - 08:02 PM

Though folks still want to make Wes Virginny out to be the villians here, the pork went disporportionately to one state. When GUEST above tried to make it sound like Wes Virginny got more than it's fair share I asked GUEST above to come back with the evidence... Oh, the silence is deafenin'....

Would anyone else like to guess which state made off with the most pork in the energy and transportation bacon bills???

And, BTW, just fir the record since there are so many folks who think that all this money goes into Wes Virginny, Wes Virginny has the highest per capita poverty rate of any state in the country, bar none. Mississippi? Alabama? Nope. It's Wes Virginia....

(Hmmmmmmm, BObert. If all the money that folks say is pourng into Wes Virginny is actually pourin' in then why is the poverty rate so high?)

Ahhhhhh, maybe because there's greater perception that all this money is going in to Wes Virginny than actually is... Meanwhile, minors still are dieing at age 50 with black lung diggin' coal to make electricity for alot of folks who love nuthin' more than to make up stories about just how friggin' benevolent the federal gov't has been to the state????

Bobert

Subject: RE: BS: Repubs Mug Taxpayers Again...
From: sapper82
Date: 16 Aug 05 - 07:33 PM

You think you have it bad?? Just think of the latest idea from New Labour.
Pensioners who can not afford their Council Tax bills can defer part of them until after their deaths when they will be paid out of their estates. Only home owning pensioners need apply.

Subject: RE: BS: Repubs Mug Taxpayers Again...
From: GUEST,Ron Davies
Date: 16 Aug 05 - 11:26 PM

The Senate is Republican. The House is Republican. Bush is Republican (by report).

Exactly why are the Republicans, including our oh-so-conservative "President", not classic budget-busters?