Pork Barrel Tech Projects On The Rise 217
An anonymous reader writes "News.com has a large article up exploring the increase in 'pork barrel'-style technology projects floating through government spending bills. The water-free urinals discussed on Slashdot last year are one such project, as is a 'Virtual Reality Spray Paint Simulator'." From the article: "Earmarks for favored recipients--known colloquially as pork--have become easier than ever for politicians to secure because of the rapid growth in homeland security and military spending, especially if they can find some plausible technological veneer. Exact figures are difficult to obtain, mostly because spending bills tend to be intentionally obfuscated and specifics are usually absent from legislative text. Government watchdogs, however, say earmarks ostensibly related to technology are clearly on the rise."
One mans pork (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:One mans pork (Score:1, Insightful)
i for once would like to be able to get an itemized listing of every cent i pay in taxes and where it goes.
This is surprising how? (Score:5, Insightful)
BTW, in other nations, we would call this type of influence bribery and corruption. Here we now call it business as usual.
Waterless toilet (Score:4, Insightful)
I dunno... (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, while a dollar is a dollar, even a hundred million here and there is rounding error on the federal budget. The real pieces are Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, pensions, the military and debt servicing; arguing about anything else is mostly a distraction from the structural problems.
NMCI (Score:3, Insightful)
Just look at the Navy's NMCI project. What a boondoggle. 8 billion dollars for a computer system where many users have to resort to using their own equipment to get anything done.
Of course the contract award to EDS didn't have anything to do with EDS being in Bush's home state. We all know how honest government contract awards are under our glorious Republican leadership, dedicated to bringing accountability into government affairs and responsibility into government spending.
Some ideas (Score:4, Insightful)
a VR program that can train a congressman how to count, so the budget can get balanced
or
a robot teacher to teach science to Republicans
I'm sure I can come up with more pie-in-the-sky ideas.
Re:Waterless toilet (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree. I've seen them in national parks/forests and they allow sanitary waste disposal without having to run massive lengths of plumbing. They're also popular at some ski resorts, but no self-respecting skier would ever use a urinal. That's why God made snow: For man to practice his urinary penmanship.
Re:Down with big government! (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course. But the Republicans have spent decades portraying themselves as the party of fiscal responsibility and enemies of big government, compared to those "tax-and-spend" Democrats who will just make government big and expensive.
So is the Federal government appreciably smaller or cheaper than it was 6 years ago?
The fact of the matter is that neither party is really in favor of small government, but only the Republicans have claimed to be. And while a few of them (McCain, for instance, based on this article) seem to mean it, most just go along with business as usual.
Re:Figures (Score:3, Insightful)
Like the "youth" in France? A law that actually allows a company to fire you? WE MUST MARCH!
Bunch of ignorant fools.
One party rule (Score:5, Insightful)
One man's pork is another man's state-craft. (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's be honest, some people complain if you spend money on anything other than what they personally like. Which would be fine if you represented everyone, and were fairly omniscient. Alas, nobody seems to listen to me when I say we should cut the War Department's (AKA Department of Defense) budget in half, and give the money to the national lab's, NASA, and health coverage for all American's
Because to me the pork in the economy is the military.
Re:Down with big government! (Score:5, Insightful)
The truth is the only parties which advocate fiscal conservativism tends to be the ones which have no control of the purse strings.
In practice modern Republican's do still want to slash spending on Democratically backed Socialist programs like Welfare, Medicare, Medicaid or anything they perceive as transferring wealth from affluent tax payers to the poor. But at the same time they are just as eager to redirect extravegent sums in to Defense and espionage something which was true of both Bush and Reagan who are the two biggest creators of national debt in U.S. history. And also in to gigantic give aways to corprate benefactors which they've done in a huge way in Medicare D, corporate farm subsidies, their "energy" bill, and massive defense contracting and Iraqi reconstruction bonanzas.
Massive tax cuts coupled with massive defense spending is the Republican strategy for bankrupting the U.S. government and when it heads to bankruptcy because of their policies they will solve the problem by dismantling entitlements and blame it all on them (though Social Security surpluses for example have been helping fund rampant spending elsewhere).
Basically the two political choices Americans have today are:
A. A Democratic party which is Socialist leaning and which will squander big sums on social programs and pork if in power
B. A Republican party that is Fascist leaning and which will squander vast sums on military spending and filling the pockets of the big corporations and wealthy party members who back them and reap windfalls out of the pockets of taxpayers.
There simply is NO viable political option today which advocates slashing the size of the American government and its out of control spending. Its not clear you could stop rampant growth of the U.S. government at this point without economic upheaval. The American economy has become massively dependent on government spending and it keeps the economy afloat at a time when the U.S. economy manufactures or exports next to nothing. Health care spending, and defense spending, much of it paid for with money borrowed from foreigners keeps America's economy.
At this point your two options are to vote Democrat and Socialist or vote Republican and Fascist. There is no libertarian or fiscal conservative option.
Re:Down with big government! (Score:5, Insightful)
A case could be made that their form of government would be as bad if not worse than what we have. The fatal flaw in Libertarianism is it would let loose the wolves of Capitalism and they would devour the nation and most of its people in a sea of unchecked greed. My image of Libertarianism in practice would the robber baron's of the late 1800's who manipulated markets, ran monopolies and who accumulated vast wealth unchecked except by feuds with each other. For example railroad tycoons who devastated farmers by charging just enough to ship their goods to market that the farmers made nothing or lost money for their hard work.
My guess is Libertarianism would lead to massive imbalances in wealth distribution, a small number of very wealthy people and a lot of people living in poverty. Of course the current Fascist leaning system under the Republican's is heading down the same road.
I think this creedo is probably the one that will hold sway in the U.S., U.K. and most of the world in the future:
"In the
It really is starting to describe what is happening in the U.S. and the U.K. in particular. If you don't recognize it it is part of Mussolini's Fascist doctrine the word to fill in the blank "......" is the "Fascist" State.
I'm forgoing moderating you down (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, you won't sleep with the boss? Fired.
You called in sick too much this week. Fired.
I don't like how you're dressing. Fired.
We hired on my 40-year-old brother. Fired.
Instead of working with the worker to correct behaviour that is causing a problem (and optionally letting them go after they have time to find another job), it makes firing be a big, ugly stick over everything.
Egalitarian societies [wikipedia.org] should not tollerate such laws.
Re:I dunno... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Down with big government! (Score:5, Insightful)
I especially like how you complain about people who don't want the government to be able to control and regulate things like railroads, then use as your example a situation where special interests bought off the politicians because the government had the power to grant them severe railroad-right-of-ways monopolies and regulated pricing by the government, but controlled by the special interests.
Isn't that the exact opposite of what the libertarians and capitalists want the government to be able to do?
Re:Down with big government! (Score:5, Insightful)
So in a Libertarian system how would you do railroads differently or at all. Let two competing interests build two railroads to serve the same markets so there is competition but twice the capital required and twice as much land wasted on right of ways. Why stop at two, how about three or four. Or of course maybe you couldn't build a railroad at all because one or a handful of Libertarian land owners could refuse to grant a critical right of way.
I think what I am saying is we are gravitating to government and social systems at extremes.
We do need government and a state to engage in activities that are for the common good and to check those that seek to take advantage and abuse their fellow citizens. But at the same time the state needs to be ruthlessly held in check to keep it from growing beyond reason and intruding in to the lives of its citizens where it doesn't belong.
Todays Socialist Democrats and Fascist Republicans are building a state that is completely dominating our lives in partnership with their corprate benefactors. The Libertarians would put us in a world without sufficient government to keep a society of hundreds of millions of people functioning properly which is why no one takes them seriously.
Moderation is the key to good government and we have no moderate leaders. We need politicians who abhor passing laws and creating government programs and bureaucracies but who are willing to do just that when there is a real and legitimate need and it is in the public interest. Right now we have professional politicians who live to churn incomprehensible bills that are pandering to one special interest after another but when looked at holistically are giant piles of steaming crap, not sound policy. Today's politicians seem to live to churn out bad legislation that each year costs us more and more money and produce less and less for benefit for the public good.
Re:Down with big government! (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting; you share much of the same views that I do. Yet, I call myself a libertarian; even though I don't agree 100% with the philosphy; I'm about 80% or so. I identify myself more with the Chicago school of economics than I do with the Mises school of economics, even though I base much of my viewpoints on both schools.
My only beef with the Libertarian Party is that its views are a bit too far on the libertarian scale, almost borderlining on anarchocapitalism. Anarchocapitalism advocates the removal of all government (not only federal, but state and local as well). Even though it is the ultimate philosophy in both economic freedom and personal freedom, I don't think it is very effective in the long run, since there are some legitamite uses for a government. A good democratic/republican government (notice the lowercase letters) should be able to voice the needs of not only those who have money, but also those who don't. (That is one of my problems with anarchocapitalism; how would the poor hire arbitration forces when dealing with coercion and there is no police force, for example?) We need some government, but not the big government that Democrats and Republicans are pushing. (I'm not saying the the Libertarian Party supports this, but they are of a further libertarian bent than some of the classical liberal parties in Europe, which are much more moderate).
We need small, decentralized government that has a civil liberties + free market philosophy. The federal government still retains its courts, military/defense, some small regulations on businesses (anti-trust, environmental stuff [but modeled in a free-market style], national natural monopoly issues, etc.), interstate highway funding (but not without the strings attached, such as a nationally set drinking age; that should be a state's rights issue, as well as environmental/air pollution restrictions that actually hurt those cities more than it helps; don't get me started on highway funding....), and even national parks (goes in line with free-market environmentalism), but everything else must be transferred to state/local governments, privatized, or outright removed. States, depending on their voters, can implement a free-market-style safety net such as school vouchers, negative income taxes, and "health care vouchers" (for lack of knowledge of a proper term) for the poor/disabled. States can also handle infrastructure. Local governments can handle things that are best handled on a local level (police, fire, school districts, ordinances, etc.).
I feel that on a state/local level, a combination of free-market ideas plus a safety net and infrastructure will work decently, provided that they stay within the principles of the market, and that those programs don't become socialistic in the long run. The federal government's power should be limited greatly, except for a select few issues that I've already enumerated. All levels of government should adopt civil libertarian views on social and personal issues, IMO.
I am a self-proclaimed minarchist (supporter of small-government) who supports free markets and civil liberties. I'm not a "taxation is theft" anarchocapitalist, but I do not lean on the left with anything. I suppose these are the viewpoints that you have also, unless I am missing something.
Re:Down with big government! (Score:2, Insightful)
Ya'all here, in the states need to remember that Democracy is NOT 'majority rule' but the result of an active, committed minority.
You are sooooo much more educated, talented and capable then those of us who said "NO MORE" in the 60's and 70's.
You have already changed the whole world, as we knew it in the early 70's. I was there! BB's/ Usenet/ Irc/, and the sifting of multiple real time information and communication is the source of such power...not only here but also world wide!
It's YOUR turn! Greedy Fat Cats should be afraid...be Very Afraid!