Cut The Pork To Pay For Katrina

Yesterday we were treated to Tom Delay informing us that the Federal budget was as lean as it could possibly be, and we debunked that myth pretty well. A lot of members of Congress are now wringing their hands about how to pay for the Katrina cleanup, and Investors Business Daily has the right approach:

There is a way out. For every buck Washington spends on Katrina relief, Congress has to cut a dollar from somewhere else in the budget. Every House member and every senator, as a show of support for the hurricane's victims, should publicly give up a pork project in their district or in their state.

This includes lawmakers from Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, as well. Those states accept pork just as the other 47 do, and it's a certainty that taxpayers' dollars went to pet projects in those coastal states that could have blunted the effects of Katrina had they been used properly.

The first stop for cutting the fat should be the leviathan highway bill. That larded piece of legislation, priced at $286.4 billion, has more than 6,000 pet projects that total $25 billion. Columnist George Will writes that is "about 10 times more than the price of the levee New Orleans needed" to keep the city from flooding.

As Will also points out, "Louisiana's congressional delegation larded the bill with $540,580,200 worth of earmarks, one-fifth the price of a capable levee."

The article didn't mention Alaska's $273 million "Bridge to Nowhere" which ought to be the first thing to go.

Don't expect this to happen, however. Pork is nearly holy in Washington and I don't expect any Congressmen to voluntarily give up anything.