It wasn’t about the war
Reading this reminded me an old Joke: A men met his daughter fiance, a poor yeshiva student, and was inquiring about his plans to provide for his new family - so he asked the young man: "How do you plan to buy food? " and the young man answer: "God will provide", "how will you afford to buy house" he asked again and the reply is again "God will provide". As the conversation end the man go home very happy, and when his wife wonder why his he so happy he say: " I just met the young man who is going to marry our daughter and he already thinks that I’m god!"
But unlike the man in the joke, I am not happy when our elected representatives think about us as Santa:
EMERGENCY spending bills are called “Christmas trees,” for the unrelated “ornaments” that are added by members of Congress. (They are exempt from budget rules and are almost never vetoed, making them magnets for pork.) The nickname is usually not literal, but the Senate’s version of the fiscal 2007 supplemental appropriations bill that passed yesterday includes, among scores of other nonessential items, money for Christmas-tree growers.
[...]
Despite their campaign talk about earmark reform last fall, the new Democratic leadership shamelessly used pork to buy votes — before the vote, Representatives Collin Peterson of Minnesota and Peter DeFazio of Oregon acknowledged that add-ons for their districts would influence their decisions.
The heavyweights also led by example: the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, added $20 million to eradicate Mormon crickets, and David Obey of Wisconsin, the House Appropriations Committee chairman, came away with $283 million for the Milk Income Loss Contract Program.
So if it seems that the main debate about the emergency funding to to the war in Iraq is the attached schedule to end the war, Or that the main concern of the senators and congressman’s before voting was about the war in Iraq - it is only illusion. In fact many of them jumped on the wagon to add earmarks, that have nothing to do with the war, and bypass the regular budget rules. When roughly 40% of the bill’s budget are designated to pork, it is hard to believe the representatives that added these earmark are going to vote on the merit of the bill alone.
Regardless of one’s position about the government role in society and one’s position about wealth distribution, once the tax is collected it should not be mishandled. I only wonder why this isn’t a causing a real public outrage - as it should.
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