Thursday, September 22, 2005

Glenn Reynolds has been pushing the Porkbusters project - the idea that each local blogger ought to find what the 2005 pork/set-asides were for his area and district, and press the local US Representative and US Senators to volunteer to repeal said pork in the interest of offsetting the Katrina cleanup costs. Intellectually, this appeals to me, but I'm having trouble figuring out whether what I'm looking at is, properly speaking, pork.

The relevant website is here, but the only stuff I could find was a scattering of six-figure bequests to various regional and local hospitals & Alpha EMS for "equipment", and a drug-education program over in Clearfield County. I'm conflicted over whether this sort of thing is obnoxious pork, or not. On the one hand, it's a lot of money by *my* standards. On the other hand, it's peanuts compared to the tens of millions sprayed over the Philly and Pittsburgh sections of the state for job retraining and access construction, and all these little ACoE budget-items for various rivers that I didn't think needed all that much in the way of control. But, you see - all that isn't local to *me*, so it's kind of hypocritical to harp on that stuff if I can't offer something locally.

Surprisingly, none of the construction work on I-99 and Rt. 322 is listed on the website. I'm not sure if they don't consider infrastructure construction "pork", or if the work was financed in a previous year, or if the appropriations went through what that site considers proper procedures, and thus isn't technically pork by their definition.

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