Centerfield

Oh, TOTALLY agreed. The Light to HEAT ratio approaches zero. Why? Because everyone (and his brother) is strongly against government waste, it's such a simple and easy no-brainer. It's as easy as being pro-environment, pro-education, and anti-crime.

But when it comes to specifics, everyone's mileage varies. You love your ox and mine is a waste of feed that I should pay for myself...

It's a shame that the attention spans are not there to drive the sort of reform that might actually make a difference: reform of the federal funding mechanisms for state projects. Congress needs some rules so that any spending bill has a section which constrains spending to items directly related to some other section which narrowly states a bill's purpose. And there's an independent review agency/comptroller which places every state wish on a prioritized list and includes some caps on annual grants which can only be overridden by, say, a 2/3 majority. The exemption would have some sort of dollar figure-x dollars of spending due to cause A is exempt by order of congress. For example, Louisiana could qualify for an exemption cap because of Katrina, only for Katrina-related spending, based on some specific number, which, once reached, would send you back to capland. No exemption could last more than 2 or 3 years, and the total number or maybe dollar value of exemptions in effect at any time would be limited. So if 10 years down the road say California had a major earthquake, Congress might have to decide whether or not Louisiana still deserved one of the exemptions.

I expect that pork, much like beauty or obscenity is very much in the eye of the beholder. On the other hand, just because that happens to be true doesn't mean that it doesn't happen to exist.

I wish my state taxes were as high as my federal taxes and my federal taxes were as low as my states. Then things would change.

Yeah we'd have state and LOCAL elections consumed by partisan vitriol instead!

Sorry. That was cynical of me. I couldn't help it, it's Monday after all.

They're not already?

Bringing the spending decisions closer to home would boost the rhetoric. But it would also increase local control over tax expenditures. This is bad?

I'm still chuckling over that non-existent half-billion in "pork" for the Cosmosphere.

But there is an objective definition for pork. It focuses on the procedure for allocating the money rather than what it is allocated towards. Some time ago, I saw a list of 12 procedural characteristics of pork (the only one I remember being introduction by conference committee) with pork being defined as anything satisfying a set number of those characteristics. Anyone know any more details?

The CAGW (link in original post) has 7-point criteria, with pork being anything that meets just two of the seven points. A fairly loose standard, but useful for comparison. That's why their "pork report" for Kansas was used as a comparitive.

Tully, I basically grant the notion that moving the dough closer to the locals is at least worth trying, and very likely could have positive results. But my perception of local politcsa is that they tend to be much sleepier, much more driven by specific issues (build or don't build that school or give teachers that raise, etc).

But I'd like to see more decisions made by genuine stakeholders as it were. Just this am I saw a story about how state officials were calling for highway project delays due to a decrease in Federal funding. In other words, delay not becuase the anything about the need for the projects has changed, but because the federal faucet flow has slowed. If the money was coming more directly out of our pockets, we'd be bound to make better and more careful decisions.

In fact, a few weeks back I was thinking about the virtue of local taxes. Right now, around here at least businesses are courted becuase they bring jobs and some property tax revenue ( and don't bring the education and service costs of say a housing development). But once the business comes to town, the relationship becomes adversarial. Often, a town has little stake in the extent to which a business thrives, as long as it stays. What I was thinking was, what if some portion of the state sales tax (say 1 or 2% of our state's 5%) had to stay in the locality? This would mean that if the local store thrived, the town would see more dough. Then you'd see less of stuff like some local power-tripping inspector busting the nuts of the local home depot or whatever because they had the seasonal plants outside the store in the parking lot, against town ordinance, because some busybody complained. Or some urgency about finishing that intersection and putting in the traffic lights so the new big box grocery store could open.

A few years ago we had some NIMBY locals fight another resident's plan to expand his 9-hole golf course to 18 holes, bottom line, abutters wanted to keep the woods next door undeveloped. Sooner or later we'll end up with more houses when that golf course fails, more traffic, and higher school costs.

If the town saw dollars from a golf course, the NIMBYs might get stifled a little bit more often.