Letter: Oink, oink

Published 4:00 pm Thursday, March 16, 2006

Instead of complaining about the Fed cutting state funds affecting state budgets to help children, the disabled and the elderly, why don’t we take a long, hard look at government spending and especially waste?

Citizens Against Government Waste publishes Porker of the Month, and annually, a very long list of what they call Prime Cuts. Politicians whose goal is to build political support for their own re-elections in their home states receive the Porker Award, but bureaucrats also are frequently Porkers, wasteful spenders.

One of the most shocking pork barrel schemes ever to come along is Alaska’s Bridge to Nowhere to connect an island to Ketchikan, Alaska, to the tune of $249 million from all American taxpayers. The island’s 50 residents don’t want the bridge. They say it’s simply a five-minute ferry ride. But it seems the governor’s wife owns acreage on the island and wants to develop it. The governor obstinately declares that if the Fed won’t cough up, he’ll just take the money from Alaska’s Highway Fund. To top all this off, Alaska has a $1.2 billion surplus, some of which the state plans to use to do a cosmetic job on the bad publicity they’ve received.

Homeland Security funds have been tagged by politicians to give grants to land-bound states rather than permitting the department to allocate their tax dollars where the most risk exists. Some $36,500 of Homeland Security funds went to a small-town bingo parlor.

Huge subsidies to Fortune 500 companies have been identified to help with strategies for global marketing to protect sugar producers, milk producers, peanut farmers and on and on. Most of these tax dollars go to huge corporations with their multimillion-dollar CEOs. What was it Ross Perot told us back in 1992? He was all for world trade too, but not this NAFTA.

And now, federal prosecutors are putting on a big show with tax dollars to punish Enron executives. Remember how Harry Truman used to say, “The buck stops here?”

No matter how impossible it is for an individual to stay on top of a mammoth industrial complex with interests all over the world, relying on subordinates who could deceive, if one were such a CEO, all he’d have to do is look at cash flow to know whether or not the company was sick or well. And if he saw they were constantly borrowing and borrowing just to make the next payroll, he would have to know there was big trouble ahead, would he not? For those two in the dock, that’s where the buck stops. Responsibility comes with the territory as well as multimillion-dollar salaries.

And here we are, wringing our hands over the plight of poor children, the disabled and the elderly, when the Fed tries to save a bit by cutting back on food stamps and such while the special interests including drug companies and insurance companies convince politicians to give them a huge windfall.

HELEN SOLEM

Vernonia