The corruption in Washington

If there was ever a more stark example of the fox guarding the hen house, it's Washington politicians insuring their own re-elections by plundering the national treasury...

The guilty pleas of lobbyist Jack Abramoff and former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham illustrate how pork-barrel projects, whether used as currency for re-election or as political favors to well-connected individuals or businesses, can corrupt the political process. The historic lack of restraint in the appropriations process has helped create a projected $371 billion budget deficit in fiscal 2006 and a national debt of $8.5 trillion. Whether the lobbying scandal and the outrage of taxpayers over “bridges to nowhere” will force Congress to cut the pork remains to be seen.

The 2006 Congressional Pig Book is the latest installment of Citizens Against Government Waste’s (CAGW) 16-year exposé of pork-barrel spending. This year’s list includes: $13,500,000 for the International Fund for Ireland, which helped finance the World Toilet Summit;
$6,435,000 for wood utilization research;
$1,000,000 for the Waterfree Urinal Conservation Initiative;
and $500,000 for the Sparta Teapot Museum in Sparta, N.C.

This year, there was good news and bad news. For fiscal 2006, appropriators stuffed 9,963 projects into the 11 appropriations bills. Despite the reduction in the number of earmarks, Congress porked out at record dollar levels with $29 billion in pork for 2006.

A currupt politician is a currupt politician regardless of his party, and republicans are every bit as bad as democrats, maybe worse since republicans are supposed to be all about limited government and reduced spending. At least democrats are up front about their desire to rob the taxpayers of their wealth in order to buy votes from their lazy, degenerate voting base.

I swear, when I'm faced with numbers like this, I sometimes just want to give up the fight and move to and island somewhere because it seems pointless to keep fighting the corruption and conflicts of interests that nobody pays attention to any more... because it's how business is done in D.C. It makes me sick that these guys get away with stuff like this.