Glutted on pork

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The shocking growth in pork-barrel spending that hit a new high in this month's year-end, $388 billion omnibus funding bill has spurred calls for budget reform. But don't expect it to happen anytime soon.

President Bush will hold his nose and sign this outrageously wasteful, 14-pound, pork-stuffed bill anyway. Why? Because it reduces discretionary spending increases overall to about 4 percent. If Pentagon and homeland defense spending is removed, the rate of spending growth is cut to about 1 percent. (This does not include so-called "emergency" funding for Afghanistan, Iraq and hurricane damage assistance that are outside the spending caps).

Even so, the growing number of special interest, earmarked provisions slipped into the bill by lawmakers -- money the White House does not want and did not ask for -- is especially disturbing to spending critics who have watched the pork-barrel scandal worsen year after year.

Budget watchers say this year's 11,000-12,000 earmark items that will cost taxpayers an added $15.8 billion are the most ever in a single bill, several thousand provisions more than earlier appropriations bills passed in the last several years. Lawmakers defend the special projects they routinely insert into a spending process that has become their political slush fund drawn from the Treasury to help them win re-election.

Here's a few examples:

• $100,000 for the High Falls Film Festival, Rochester, N. Y.

• $35,000 for the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame.

• $250,000 for the Country Music Hall of Fame, Nashville, Tenn.

• $250,000 for the Alaska Statehood Celebration, University of Alaska.

• $25,000 to develop a curriculum to study mariachi music in the Clark County School District in Nevada.