RON HART: Pork by any other name smells the same

“The past five presidents met for lunch the other day at the White House. They could not decide who would pick up the tab, so they left it for a future generation to pay.”— SNL Weekend Update

It seems that Obama and his lemmings in Congress have a plan to get us out of the credit crunch, which was caused by borrowing more money than we could afford to buy things that we do not need.

His plan to fix this is to borrow even more money that we cannot afford, to buy even more things that we do not need.

The Democrats’ special twist on this grand scheme is that now their cronies and unions will get a cut. Take that, Jack Abramoff!
Putting Congress in charge of spending our money efficiently is like putting Plaxico Burress in charge of gun control.

Since government got us into most of the problems we have, why is more government the solution? It has convinced many that we must look to government for answers, when it is really the problem. Government seems to almost insist upon itself, and for some odd reason, we are conditioned to believe this.

If you wonder why it makes no sense to embark upon these infrastructure projects that Obama is proposing, look no further than New Mexico’s Governor Bill Richardson.

Obama took on a little more ethical taint recently when Bill Richardson had to remove himself from consideration as Commerce Secretary because of an investigation into his awarding of state contracts to donors. Apparently, Richardson thought what he did was too corrupt for a Cabinet confirmation, but not corrupt enough to step down as governor of his state.
And that is my point.

We are getting ready to spend money that we do not have to pay off political cronies and unions in these “shovel ready projects” that we used to know as “pork.”

They say there are no “pork earmarks” in the bill, but the whole bill is pork. To make it worse, after Washington gets its greasy hands on it, the money will pass through the states and the hands of Governors Blagojevich, Richardson and their ilk before landing in the paws of the politically-connected unions.

Why not say to Washington, “Enough is enough!”?

Let us keep our own money. If the dummies among us want to borrow too much for a house they cannot afford and a truly private bank wants to lend it, then the consequences are theirs.

The more inept government becomes, the more it grows to “correct” its own mistakes. By increasing government programs, laws and “oversight,” it exacerbates problems it initiated. The SEC had its budget tripled after the Enron debacle, yet it totally missed the Bernie Madoff scheme.

Government, by extension, rewards the most inept and bungling business models with bailout money.

The more regulated you are and the more you prove yourself a poor steward of money, the more you get from the government. Free markets allocate capital in just the opposite way. The best business models, with honest and proven management, attract private investment capital. This is how it should be.

These laws and regulations are put upon us for reasons like “fairness,” “change,” “investment in education,” and — my favorite — “for the common good.”

Every piece of legislation is called some pie-in-the-sky name by Congress: “No Child Left Behind” (which I think Michael Jackson co-authored), “Prescription Drug Benefit Act” (The Old People Vote Act), the “Fairness Doctrine” (The Democrats Don’t Want Free Speech Except By The Left Act), and the list goes on, ad nauseum.

Disguised as something you could not possibly be against, the bills are packed with self-serving laws and pork to the point of no value, except to elevate government’s self-importance.

My most recent favorite was when the breathless Treasury ran to Congress and just had to have $710 billion for the “Emergency Economic Stabilization Act,” or “TARP” money.

No one knows where it is now, so Mission Accomplished. Brownie, you are doing a heck of a job.

It took Bush eight years and two wars to increase the deficit $1.5 trillion. Obama has — and you have to love this one — “The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act” coming at you first thing. He will be able to increase our deficit by $1 trillion in his first month in office.

By media standards, that will make Obama better than Bush.

Let’s not buy into more “government is the answer,” because that is what George Bush taught us. He was the “outside the Beltway” governor who was going to tame D.C. because it did not work.

Instead, he went there, expanded government, and proved to us that he was right: it does not work, not under him and certainly not under the Democrats.

Ron Hart is a southern humorist and political columnist. He can be reached at RevRon10@aol.com.