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Budget gloat

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Ravens-Grin
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Budget gloat 2004-03-23 21:49:37 Reply

Alright I was bored so I ended watching C-SPAN, yes that sort of did make it a little worse. But there was this one thing that the Republica from Wisconsin brought up. That Congress makes a budget resolution, but does not have to adhere to this budget throughout the year. There are many work arounds for it. For instance, a couple years ago there was a flood somewhere and they built a 2 million dollar mansion on top of a mountain. Did the mansion get damaged and insurance wouldn't cover it or something?

Another thing that was brought up was the ability to hide special interests into different bills. One was a bill that was being brought up in the Labor Department(I'm going off of memory here so bear with me) that somehow included a Rain Forest Museum in Idaho that costs around 50 million. Now really, how are those two things related? This by the way was rejected, there was a vote in December which rejected it.

But really, is that alright that certain projects are able to be hidden behind bills and acts so that they can get certain projects created, even though it has no coorelation with what the bill is?

RandomFreak
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Response to Budget gloat 2004-03-23 22:50:46 Reply

What you're talking about with the stuff in the bills is called "porkbarreling". Basically what happens is a bill gets introduced and before some member of congress back it they tack on pet projects in their home districts (helps them get re-elected back home).

These porkbarrel projects can serve more than one purpose. Sometime opponents of a bill will overload it with porkbarrel projects in order to get it voted down.

Welcome to politics.