Highways to Porkville

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A lot of those billboards posted at public construction sites that say "Your Tax Dollars At Work" need to be replaced with signs that read "Wasting Your Money."

This is the sad but inescapable conclusion after thumbing through the 2,000-plus pages of the $286 billion transportation bill that President Bush signed yesterday -- legislation that Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona correctly called "a monstrosity" stuffed with outrageous, waste-ridden pork barrel projects that often have nothing to do with roads.

The bill is larded with tens of billions of dollars in dubious public projects sought by a variety of special interest pleaders. The provisions are called "earmarks" because they've been inserted into the bill by lawmakers for a specific client back home.

No one in Congress has railed against these spending abuses more than Mr. McCain, who deserves the fulsome praise of every taxpayer whose pockets are being picked by lawmakers for their own political benefit. He has gone to the Senate floor each year to denounce these bills, but each year the abuses have gotten worse -- much worse.

In 1982, the transportation bill contained 10 earmarks costing $386 million. By 1987, they had grown to 152 earmarks, costing $1.4 billion. In 1991, the number mushroomed to 538, costing $6 billion. Last year's bill included 1,850 earmarks that fleeced taxpayers of $9 billion.

The bill Mr. Bush just signed contained, at last count, over 6,300 earmark projects that totaled a whopping $20 billion.

The list is nauseating in its fiscal thievery and greed. Here's a sampling of some of its worst abuses:

• $18.75 million to build a bridge that will join the Island of Gravina, with a population of less than 50 people, to Ketchikan, Alaska, a project that is known on Capitol Hill as the "Bridge to Nowhere."

• $2.32 million for aesthetic landscaping along the Ronald Reagan Freeway on Route 118, something the late president, who built his political career on fighting wasteful spending, would have opposed.

• $480,000 to restore a historic warehouse along the Erie Canal in Lyons, N.Y.