Posted at anticollective:


Source: Pork Busters

Edited to fit size.

Let me use last year's highway bill to illustrate how the practice of earmarking has grown and become such a tempting target for abuse. In 1987, President Reagan vetoed a highway bill because it was ten billion dollars over his budget, and contained over a hundred earmarks. He remarked at the time of his veto that he hadn’t seen that much pork since he had "handed out blue ribbons at the Iowa State Fair." The highway bill we passed last year, and which the President signed into law, was twelve billion dollars over his request, and contained 6,731 earmarks, which included the now infamous "bridge to nowhere." That's quite an explosion in the growth of earmarks, which you have the privilege of paying for with your gas taxes. And it represents 6,371 separate opportunities for a lobbyist to ask a single member of Congress for a favor that the rest of Congress won't vote on and most members won’t even notice.
The total number of earmarks in spending bills has grown from 4,126 in 1994, the last year of Democratic control, to 14,404 in 2004. That's a 240 percent increase in ten years time. In dollars, the cost borne by taxpayers for earmarks has nearly doubled.

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