Friday, June 09, 2006

More Pork

I have begun compiling a list of pork barrel spending that I will display here. If you have a project that you would like to include please contact me by e-mail at numismatist18@yahoo.com. Enjoy! This should be amusing. For a full list of wasteful spending you can visit Citizens Against Wasteful Government by clicking here
I have not combed through all of the reports yet. So if you find an interesting one let me know and I will post it here. Thanks!
Note: Not all of these items are current.

New: It has been discovered that over $1.25 billion in Katrina aid money was given to fraudulent claims

My personal favorite: $13,500,000 to finance project in Ireland, which among other things, included helping to finance the World Toilet Summit

$500,000 for a University to set up a program examining how Congress makes budget decisions

$2 million to pay for a Navy study exploring the use of "no flush" urinals

$250,000 for a museum dedicated to tea pots

$180,000 for research on berries

$700,000 to give the Largo, Florida Police Department laptop computers in their patrol cars

$79 million for wood utilization research since 1985

$2 million for the Ted Stevens International Airport in Anchorage

$1.4 million to replace a working dog kennel at a military base

$500,000 for design, planning, and equipment for a forensic laboratory in Vermont

$225,000 for the Beluga Whaling committee

$250,000 to fund Pinellas County, Florida's Police Athletic League

$447,000 for halibut data collection

$300,000 for the County Neighborhood Watch Program in Prince George, Maryland

$3,768,000 for research dealing with shrimp aquaculture

$500,000 for a Virtual Perimeter Video Surveillance System for the Pittsburgh Police Department

$249 million for the now infamous Bridge to Nowhere

$750,000 to give the Snohomish County, Washington Sheriff'’s Office palm-imaging technology

$200,000 to the city of North Pole for "recreational improvements"

$50 million to build a five acre indoor tropical rain forest in Iowa

$200,000 to the University of Hawaii to produce a film on the Kalahari Bushmen (does anyone even know of what the Kalahari Bushmen is?)

$1,700,000 for the International Fertilizer Development Center

$1,000,000 to conduct marine mammal population surveys

$100,000 to the Institute of International Sport to prevent youth crime

$100,000 for the University of Pittsburgh Center for Sports Medicine to research the knee injuries in female athletes

$100,000 for a high school to enhance its metalworking program

$50,000 for an elementary school to start an International Baccalaureate Program

$400,000 for AIB College of Business to maintain a program that recruits and trains students in captioning and court reporting

$1,500,000 for to record data aboutAlaska'ss currents and tides

$2,700,000 for the Wood Education and Resource Center

$2,500,000 added for Pinellas County, Florida. The bill does not specify the purpose of this money.

$18,500,000 to help create jobs in Ireland through such programs as building a replica Jeanie Johnston (a Canadian ship that brought famine victims to North America)

$2,000,000 forminiaturee golf in St.Augustinee

5,000,000 for the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP)

$2,000,000 for a program called Seniors vs. Marketing Scams

$1,000,000 to produce a video which promotes the significance of National Patriotic Holidays for young people

$150,000 for the Military Sexual Integrity Program

$270,000 for wool research

$225,000 to repair a swimming pool that a Congressman and his friends filled with tadpoles in their youth.

$238,000 for the National Wild Turkey (NWTF) Federation


Here is a great discussion of pork spending

5 comments:

Dem-X said...

That's some list!

Hey, my name's Kenny and I run the Lubbock DFA blog that you commented on today. Thanks for the comment; I hope you will stop by again sometime.

My friend Ed Hinders from Canyon, TX does not have an email address that I know of -- he's an older fellow. I promised him that I would get his message out as best I could online. If you look him up and contact him (I only see him at bigger events), it would make his week. :)

I know that pork barrel politics is probably ubiquitous, but it's really gotten out of hand under the supposedly fiscally conservative Republican administrations of the last 30 years. Thank you for taking the time to document the waste.

Anonymous said...

I kind of like the US national debt and the prospect that one day, pretty soon, the developing world is going to screw the US government with its own debt burden, in exactly the same way that successive US governments have been screwing the developing world for the last fifty years.

Good luck though ;)

Progressive Pinhead said...

While the U.S's human rights record is far from perfect the countries that would replace the U.S as the sominant superpower, have records 1,000 times worse. I will not list all of the abuses because they are too numerous and that is not the focous of my blog but, if a nation does not respect the rights of its own people it will respect no one. Your view is ignorant of the facts and wishing someone who has done nothing to you harm make's you worse than the enemy you are trying to destroy.

Anonymous said...

LOL

Not exactly the place I imagined getting into political discussions.

In terms of screwing other countries, I think China has a significantly better record than the US - or most of the west for that matter.

In terms of screwing its own citizens, then I would certainly have to grant the validity of what you say about China .. unless I happened to be a resident of New Orleans.

China is however developing and I have every confidence that it will continue its slow development to being an increasingly libertarian society.

But as a non-American owner of a slice of the US economy – and a self-confessed Americosceptic when it comes to international politics

Cal Ulmann said...

Check out the National Taxpayer Union's blog Government Bytes: http://blog.ntu.org/main/
It covers government spending pretty thoroughly.

I'm currently working as an intern at NTU.