Sen. Tom Coburn Goes After Alaska's Porktacular "Bridge To Nowhere"

It's the tragedy of the commons. When no one has any incentive to conserve or manage a property prudently, and all are allowed to take from it what they will, it quickly becomes a ruin.

As a general rule wasteful -- often perfectly useless -- porkbarrel spending has been unchecked, as no one in the commons was keeping an eye on his fellows despoiling the land. Now Tom Coburn has started pointing fingers, and, hopefully, the Alaska delegation will point fingers back at Coburn-- which is good, because I'm sure Oklahoma has a lot of pork too.

These jackasses have to stop winking at this boondoggle -- "free" money which isn't free which is used to fund "critical" local projects which aren't critical at all (or else they would already be being paid for by local governments) -- and start attacking each other's pork.

Good on ya, Senator Coburn.

One some issues, we need unity. On a lot of others, we need a lot of disunity and argument. This is one of them. If checks and balances are a good thing, it will be useful to have some checks and balances in the Senate itself, between states pointing out other states' wasteful pork.

As Traffic Non-Santa notes -- and which I've noted before -- yes, it's true that pork is not the biggest part of the budget that needs to be trimmed. But it's the easiest problem to tackle -- most Americans are against pork, at least as a general matter -- and if they can't do this there's no way they get to the bigger problems.

posted by Ace at 11:22 AM

| Access Comments