It’s Not Pork. It’s a Sweetener!
The bailout bill passed in the Senate, but it took a bit of trickery for that to happen. The bill had to be added as an amendment to another bill that had already passed the House, which just so happened to contain huge chunks of pork for the Democrats and tax cuts for the Republicans.
Funny how that works, isn’t it?
Here’s a partial list of the goodies now tied to the bailout.
New Tax earmarks in Bailout bill
- Film and Television Productions (Sec. 502)
- Wooden Arrows designed for use by children (Sec. 503)
- 6 page package of earmarks for litigants in the 1989 Exxon Valdez incident, Alaska (Sec. 504)Tax earmark “extenders” in the bailout bill.
- Virgin Island and Puerto Rican Rum (Section 308)
- American Samoa (Sec. 309)
- Mine Rescue Teams (Sec. 310)
- Mine Safety Equipment (Sec. 311)
- Domestic Production Activities in Puerto Rico (Sec. 312)
- Indian Tribes (Sec. 314, 315)
- Railroads (Sec. 316)
- Auto Racing Tracks (317)
- District of Columbia (Sec. 322)
- Wool Research (Sec. 325)
Wool Research. Wooden arrows. Earmarks for a case that’s almost twenty years old.
It makes you wonder why, if the bailout is such a necessity that it had to be passed in the middle of the night last night, it was necessary to bait members of Congress with incentives to get them to vote for it.
Congress’ actions the past two weeks sure don’t match the doom and gloom the MSM is cranking out. Read this Washington Times article for a good helping of alarmism. I found this paragraph particularly interesting:
Nine in 10 auto sales are financed with loans, which have become harder to get. Many consumers who hoped to use home-equity loans to purchase cars have seen their credit lines reduced or shut down. Even consumers with good credit ratings have been reluctant to buy cars in the uncertain economic environment, the car companies said.
In other words, these people aren’t buying cars because they have less money but because they’re now afraid to to the sort of silly debt-loading that got us into this mess in the first place.
With all deference to the auto industry, which has its own self-made problems, too freaking bad. If we get nothing else from this whole mess, we should get the point that we need to keep our spending within our means instead of what we think our means will be at some point in an imagined future.
That said, does it strike anyone else as a significant enough point that maybe it should have been mentioned a bit more prominently in the article?
Ah well. It’s probably not important. There’s pork to be collected, folks. That’s important!
Other Posts of Interest:
- What Does Our Government Want to Buy Next, Gambling Debts? (UPDATE: A Glimpse of Our New SecTreas?)
- Yet More on the Mortgage Mess, Including What Must Happen
- McCain and Obama Are Ignoring the Elephant in the Room
Category: The Economy and Your Money
