The 2005 Spending Budget

The $388,000,000,000 [Billion] budget for the upcoming year is just amazing. The 1,000+ page, 14 lbs. pound piece of shit had 11,000 pieces of pork added to it. The pork added up to about $15.8B for special local projects that the creaters of the bill can take credit for back home. Things like:

• $4 million for an Alabama fertilizer development center
• $300,000 for a parking garage in Auburn, Maine
• $8 million to rehabilitate a "historic cafeteria building" in Oregon's Crater Lake National Park
• $1.1 million for research into the development of baby food and other products made from salmon
• $1 million for a Norwegian American Foundation in Seattle
• $1 million for a "Wild American Shrimp Initiative"
• $50,000 to control wild hogs in Missouri
• $350,000 for music education programs at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland
• $100,000 for a weather museum in Punxsutawney, PA
• $1 million for a world birding center, Texas
• $2 million for the government to buy back the presidential yacht USS Sequoia, sold in 1977 by President Jimmy Carter to demonstrate frugality

Sen. John McCain was quite pissed about all of the stupid pork. He took the floor of the Senate and asked

Why does the U.S. taxpayer need to fund this 'no shrimp left behind' act?

Nobody responded. And most likely, nobody ever will. Why? Because this kind of legislation is basically anonymous.

But surely someone or some group[s] must have lost out, right? For sure.

• The State Department
• Federal air traffic controllers
• The National Science Foundation
• Several environmental programs
• Several low-income education programs

Our tax dollars, hard at work.

The 1,000+ pages was delivered seven weeks late and left legislators with way too little time to peruse the bill, let alone a brief skim. It reminds me of a moment in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 when Michigan House Representative John Conyers, a Democrat, said to Moore regarding the little provisions in the Homeland Security Act: "Sit down, my son. We don't read most of the bills." Crazy. Shouldn't these people have at least a week to read through the bills? It was already a week late, why not wait another week? That's what they're paid to do.