Word: pork
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...logic behind a line item veto is simple. By putting the entire federal budget into a single omnibus spending package, which the president must ratify in its entirety or veto (thereby shutting down the complete federal bureaucracy), legislators can insert a number of pork-barrel expenditures to please their constituents and improve their re-election chances. That is simply the nature of the legislative beast...
...pork-barrel expenditures included in the last omnibus spending bill, signed just before winter recess, range from the slightly humorous--$240,000 for a study of the damage done to macademia nuts by rats--to the seriously expensive--$25 million for an unneeded new airport in Fort Worth near the home territory Speaker of the House Jim Wright. In the several-thousand pages of an omnibus appropriations bill, these expenditures can be shielded from constituents, and congressmen can hide their support for these perks by claiming that they voted for the whole package, not individual appropriations...
...deficits of $170 billion or more. Then Government's budget "summiteers," after much agonizing, produced a puny two-year, $76 billion deficit reduction package. Just before Christmas, Congress presented the President with a $603.9 billion spending bill for fiscal year 1988. The 2,100-page law was packed with pork-barrel goodies to please lawmakers' constituents...
...rats; $1.4 million for a catfish farm in Stuttgart, Ark.; and -- in a special dig at the legislators -- $500,000 to bring leaders of emerging democracies to the U.S. to study the workings of Congress. Not even Reagan has the chutzpah to mention one particularly large chunk of pork: $25 million for an unnecessary new airport near Fort Worth, the hometown of House Speaker Jim Wright. After all, Wright will be sitting just behind the President...
...while a line-item veto might help diminish budget pork, it would have only a negligible impact on the deficit. Huge chunks of the budget -- Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs, which total more than $325 billion -- are granted automatically and do not require annual % reauthorization. Other spending measures, such as agricultural support programs ($26 billion), are politically sacrosanct. And while some Democrats might be ready to chop away at the $298 billion in defense spending, substantial Pentagon cuts would be unlikely under any Republican Administration. Thus, spending that is truly discretionary (read politically negotiable) amounts to less than...