How much pork that had nothing to do with Sandy was inserted in this bill Red Paul?
Hungry101 wanted to know about pork in the Sandy relief bill. I took a look at Hot Air, a leading conservative website, and found this unsurprising answer: there is no evidence of pork, but the wingnuts are pretending that there is.
The site has a few different bloggers. Let's look at what one of them, Allahpundit,
had to say on Jan. 2:
Fun fact: By some estimates, roughly half of the $60 billion aid bill that passed the Senate consists of expenditures unrelated to Sandy relief, i.e. pork.
Oh my gosh! Now here's the report that his colleague, Ed Morrissey,
filed two days later:
As I wrote three weeks ago, almost 25% of the $60-billion-plus package goes somewhere else than directly to the victims or the infrastructure actually damaged by the hurricane.
Well, that's only a difference of ... 100% . Makes you think Hot Air readers don't pay much attention.
And what is pork anyway? Allahpundit is quite confident that the term stands for any money going to any causes apart from a bill's headline item. He never backs that up, of course. The traditional definition is a bit more limited. Here's the Free Dictionary: "Government funds, appointments, or benefits dispensed or legislated by politicians to gain favor with their constituents." And Merriam-Webster's: "government funds, jobs, or favors distributed by politicians to gain political advantage." Even the loosey-goosey Urban Dictionary plays it straighter than Allahpundit: "Personally motivated spending of government funds by politicians."
You see the theme here? Pork is government goodies that are ladled out simply to help a given politician. No public interest involved. But what alleged items of pork are found in the Sandy bill? It turns out there aren't any that meet any of the definitions above.
Hot Air links to an AP article as providing evidence of pork. Here's Rep. Paul Ryan, quoted in the article, making the case against the bill:
[the bill is] packed with funding for unrelated items, such as commercial fisheries in American Samoa and roof repair of museums in Washington, D.C.
Now the thing is, American Samoa and Washington, D.C., do not have congressmen. They have representatives who can sit in the House and observe. The representatives don't vote, don't chair committees, don't wield any power. So if measures that help D.C. and Samoa wind up in a bill, odds are good that they got there on their own, not with help from a self-interested congressmen. Meaning, by any definition except that of a desperate right-winger, they are not pork.
You know where else some of the non-Sandy money goes? To fisheries wrecked by storms in Alaska and along the Gulf Coast:
To court votes, Democrats last week broadened some of their bill’s provisions to cover damage from Hurricane Isaac, which struck the Gulf Coast earlier this year. A provision was added to the $2.9 billion allotted to Army Corps of Engineers projects to reduce future flooding risks; the coverage area for that program will now include areas hit by Isaac in addition to Sandy. Democrats also shifted $400 million into a community development program for regions suffering disasters, beyond areas struck by Sandy.
What a terrible thing. The bill doesn't just address storm victims in the Northeast. It helps victims of storms in other parts of the country too. Pork!
And remember, this article was cited by a leading conservative blogger as the evidence for his claims about the bill. Read the AP article and you find just one spending item that looks iffy: "$58 million in subsidies for tree planting on private properties." That's out of $60.4 billion. Note that I don't say the tree-planting money is necessarily a bad idea. I don't know. But out of all the items listed, it's the only one that looks like it
might be a bad idea.
