EDITORIAL: Stick some pork in it
Remember all the talk in Washington about the importance of a “clean” bill to fund the federal government and raise the debt ceiling? There’s no such thing. Lawmakers love using last-minute legislation to leverage pork and new spending money.
Included in the 35-page bill were $2.2 billion for a dam in Kentucky (home of two Republican senators, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell) that had an original price tag of $775 million; a $174,000 “death benefit” for the widow of Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., who died in June with a net worth of about $60 million; and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of budget increases for Veterans Affairs, the Interior Department and other agencies.
What was that sequester thing again? The more we spend, the more we borrow, the more interest we pay on the national debt, the bigger the burden we put on future generations. If we can’t put the brakes on these giveaways, how can we ever tackle the runaway entitlement spending that threatens to bankrupt the country?
