This provision pertains only to the singular state of Louisiana, known for its cuisine, Cajun culture, corruption, and much more. But is Louisiana the only state to get special treatment in this bill? I thought it was going to include some other Medicaid-related provisions to take care of a few states represented by more influential senators, among them Harry Reid himself.
Republicans, save perhaps the couple who may vote for the bill, may collect campaign contributions from those opposed to the bill, but those solons aren’t likely to see any pork for their states in it, that going to key Democrats.
The details of policy, or even the subject at hand are not important. It doesn’t matter if the subject is health-care or some routine budget item. Those are just vehicles and window-dressing.
It’s the payoffs that are important. It’s the opportunities for special favors, kickbacks and graft.
Not to quibble (well, ok, to quibble), but the wordy definition of a “disaster-recovery FMAP adjustment State” (5 words), is found in new paragraph (aa)(2), and is 268 words long. The newly defined term is used 3 times, costing four extra words each time, for a total word cost of only 280. Still absurd, of course.
Unfortunately, this is common practice. Legislators do it all the time in a deliberate attempt to hide their venality. Check out the targeted transition provisions of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 sometime. (see, e.g., Pub. L. No. 99-514, § 204, 100 Stat. 2085(1986)).
Wow, business as usual in DC sucks! And it has sucked since 1870! We shoulda stopped passing laws 140 years ago and quit before the corruption ruined everything.
Sarcastro says:
Wow, business as usual in DC sucks! And it has sucked since 1870! We shoulda stopped passing laws 140 years ago and quit before the corruption ruined everything.
I thought didn’t know that the Civil Rights Act constituted one big pork barrel project (thanks for the heads up on that) and that that Womens’ suffrage was rolled into a constitutional amendment, not a statute (thanks for the information, btw).
I’m sure your note about Antitrust legislation also proves how valuable federal legislation is, but I’m not intelligent enough to figure it out.
::so she sold out the rest of us cheap- she’s willing to cripple the country with socialist nonsense for a lousy 100 million dollars. Maybe that’s just her piece. Louisianans never have been known for acute intelligence, only laziness and corruption.
The state and it’s administrations have played the grasshopper to the taxpayer’s ant forever.
I’m surprised that other Senators aren’t lining up to have the language changed just a bit to include their states. (Off the top of my head, California – with its wild fires and fiscal problems – seems like a great candidate for this, with just a few linguistic changes.)
Mahan Atma: What, like the Republicans (and so-called “moderate” Dems from the red states) aren’t getting paid bucket-loads of money to oppose the bill??
Not with taxpayer money, no; that wouldn’t even make any sense.
(You do understand that this is the problem here: not that Landrieu is being influenced, but that she’s being bought off with money that doesn’t belong to the buyers.)
Sarcastro: Yep, no horse trading to get Civil RIghts passed, nosirree! And Womens’ sufferage was smooth sailing with no deals at all!
So you’re saying it’s a good thing that legislation be packed with financial goodies to help legislators get reelected. And that it be carefully concealed so that none of the rubes can figure out exactly what’s going on. It’s just far too much to expect a statesman to vote on a bill on the merits.
Sarcastro: And who needs Antitrust after all? If that invisible hand wants to build a monopoly, then I say I get to play the hat!
Can you point to any successful long-term monopolies that have not involved government coercion to make them effective? Standard Oil couldn’t have become the archetype of the monopoly if the government hadn’t enforced the very trust agreements that limited competition.
Mahan Atma: What, like the Republicans (and so-called “moderate” Dems from the red states) aren’t getting paid bucket-loads of money to oppose the bill??
The distinction, in case you can’t see it Mahan, is that the “bucket -loads” of money being paid to those opposing the bill ARE NOT BEING TAKEN FROM THE POCKETS OF TAXPAYERS THROUGH THE COERCIVE POWER OF GOVERNMENT TAXATION FOR THE PURPOSE OF REDISTRIBUTING THE FUNDS TO POLITICAL ALLIES FOR THE PURPOSE OF BUYING THEIR VOTES!
Sarcastro: Yep, no horse trading to get Civil RIghts passed, nosirree!And Womens’ sufferage was smooth sailing with no deals at all!
What if they weren’t?
What you’re saying here, stripped of the sarcasm — which is only funny when you take a position to the extreme, not when you merely repeat the same argument with a snarky tone — is that if a bad process is used to implement a good law, then this somehow validates the bad process.
Which, in other words, is just a wordy way of saying “Ends justify the means.” Which is neither funny nor true.
And who needs Antitrust after all?If that invisible hand wants to build a monopoly, then I say I get to play the hat!
Invisible hands don’t build monopolies; governments do. When invisible hands temporarily lead to monopoly, antitrust isn’t needed, because invisible hands will take them down again.
There are all sorts of economists who think monopolies are not a natural result of unrestrained capitalism, they just keep real quiet for some reason. Microsoft and AT&T’s ability to ignore market forces was all the governments’ fault!
Other lame laws that prove we don’t need federal government:
fighting child porn,
national highways,
GI bill,
scientific research,
IP protection,
taking out Hitler,
keeping my cell phone from interfering with my radio,
keeping poison and poo out of my drinking water,
making sure medication doesn’t kill people,
the parks system, the internet,
FDIC
much of the Western US.
All this suucks because the government doesn’t function like it should in an ideal world! A pox on everything unperfect!
[Point taken, David Nieporent. It's hard to do the snarky substantive stuff anyhow. Colbert I ain't.
To be clear, I think deal making and pork are just about inevitable any government system and that any cure would likely be more damaging than the disease.
Furthermore, a lot of the outrage is hogwash - it's not lining the politicians' pockets, it's going to stuff in their district. That stuff may be more or less worthwhile, but the constituents do like it. Government you deserve and all that.
The main issue I have with pork is the general inefficiency of pumping all that money through the federal government and than back to the states. But using the Federal Government to help your specific constituents was kind of part of the deal when the US was made. The fact that part of that help is fat sacks of cash money I see as somewhat inevitable]
What’s the point of writing the bill that way? I can understand why a member of Congress would want to obscure the fact that a subsidy was designed so that only one specific corporation would qualify for it, but what’s the rationale for obscuring a special subsidy for Louisiana? Is it about some rule of Senate procedure?
David Nieporent:…Invisible hands don’t build monopolies; governments do.When invisible hands temporarily lead to monopoly, antitrust isn’t needed, because invisible hands will take them down again.
Yes, and what is human that doesn’t eventually pass, hence the wisdom, “This too shall pass.”
The question is how soon they will pass, and whether we must or should wait until they do so on their own without any hastening by us. I believe that there are many things that would not pass nearly soon enough without such hastening, which sometimes must come from the government. (Is that blasphemy to a libertarian’s ears?)
(By the way, do “invisible hands” always work to bring about the most desirable ends? Did even Adam Smith believe they do?)
Sarcastro: [Point taken, David Nieporent. It’s hard to do the snarky substantive stuff anyhow. Colbert I ain’t.To be clear, I think deal making and pork are just about inevitable any government system and that any cure would likely be more damaging than the disease. Furthermore, a lot of the outrage is hogwash — it’s not lining the politicians’ pockets, it’s going to stuff in their district. That stuff may be more or less worthwhile, but the constituents do like it. Government you deserve and all that.The main issue I have with pork is the general inefficiency of pumping all that money through the federal government and than back to the states. But using the Federal Government to help your specific constituents was kind of part of the deal when the US was made. The fact that part of that help is fat sacks of cash money I see as somewhat inevitable]
Some of it is lining the politicians’ pockets. Jack Murtha’s nephew Robert does very well by being the subcontractor that lots of contractors must hire (sort of like the guy sent by the local “Benevolent Neighborhood Association” to construction projects). Harry Reid, Ken Calvert, etc. push projects right near their landholdings. Bud Shuster was literally in bed with the highway industry lobby (that has monetary value – just ask Eliot Spitzer).
It’s also so difficult to track the money that there is great reason to fear that far more is being diverted to Congressmen and their friends and families.
This reminds me of the situation in the Pennsylvania State Legislature. The legislature is prohibited from passing legislation which targets a specific municipality, so they get around that prohibition by coming up with “general” legislation that is full of qualifiers which leave only the specific municipality affected by the bill. Stuff like: this bill only pertains to class-b municipalities in counties with a population over 500,000 next to counties which contain a state park and within 5 miles of a lake.
[NickM what you describe is an outrage to be sure, but certainly de minimis compared to the amount of money flowing through politicians hands'. And again, how do you propose to end such patronage?]
theobromophile: Off the top of my head, California — with its wild fires and fiscal problems — seems like a great candidate for this, with just a few linguistic changes.
That’s the problem with having principled liberals like Boxer and Feinstein representing your state. They’re going to vote for left wing bills anyway, so there’s no need to bribe them.
Maybe some enterprising Californian will campaign on the platform of “I wouldn’t have voted for the health care bill without some major kickbacks to our state.” I think he [that is, the generic pronoun 'he', because I'm not talking about a group of people the use of the word 'they' doesn't make sense] would win more than a few votes.
Heck, he could even call himself a Republican, so the Senators selling us down the river can call it “bipartisan.”
Sarcastro: [NickM what you describe is an outrage to be sure, but certainly de minimis compared to the amount of money flowing through politicians hands’. And again, how do you propose to end such patronage?]
I agree that as a percentage of the budget it’s de minimis, though when you add up all the expenditures associated with some highway construction (e.g., Bridge to Nowhere), you’re talking about billions of dollars).
I don’t have good ways of dealing with some of those types of featherbedding. A properly functioning Congressional ethics process would have forced Shuster from his committee chairmanship, thus markedly decreasing what he could accomplish for his mistress’s employer. Murtha could probably be prosecuted. The more generalized ways of boosting the value of one’s property (nearby federal development projects) are where things start to get really difficult. I suppose you can create bright-line rules about distance from (and value of) landholdings, but those sweep both too broadly and too narrowly.
I don’t like the line-item veto for other reasons, but that might significantly cut down on spending of this nature.
Term limits (which I also don’t like for other reasons) might have some effect too – although they’d be more likely to cut down on “clean” pork rather than “personal pocket” pork.
At least at the state legislative level, my solution for district pork would be to abolish districting (how that could be done is too complex to explain here), but that doesn’t really work for Congress.
IMO aggressive enforcement of existing criminal laws (and harsh sentences for those convicted) may be by default the way to go. I don’t think many members of Congress want to risk a Cunningham- or Jefferson-length prison sentence.
What’s the point of writing the bill that way? I can understand why a member of Congress would want to obscure the fact that a subsidy was designed so that only one specific corporation would qualify for it, but what’s the rationale for obscuring a special subsidy for Louisiana? Is it about some rule of Senate procedure?
Because it’s a violation of the “general welfare” clause. Granted, that clause is mostly dead except as a warped excuse to exercise unenumerated powers, but why take the chance that, if you violate it blatantly enough, the courts might feel compelled to enforce it?
Greeting from a native of the great sovereign state of Louisiana. Louisiana is often hard to describe, but the liberal attorneys in Washington have taken it to another level, but then politicians often “complicate the obvious while trivializing the momentous”. Found you site via a google search. Ya’ll come visit me sometimes at my extreme right wing blog TOTUS.
John Moore says:
It’s time to water the tree of liberty, or whatever!
November 19, 2009, 10:32 pmConstantin says:
Vile.
I almost hope this passes, just to see what will happen.
November 19, 2009, 11:22 pmDropInTheBucket says:
It’s only another hundred million.
November 19, 2009, 11:51 pmLarryA says:
“Well, we couldn’t get you food and water when you needed it, and the cops we sent in swiped your firearms, but by gosh, only four years later…“
November 20, 2009, 12:21 amsitzpinkler says:
It’s perfectly reasonable to charge people with the knowledge of all laws.
November 20, 2009, 12:56 amneurodoc says:
This provision pertains only to the singular state of Louisiana, known for its cuisine, Cajun culture, corruption, and much more. But is Louisiana the only state to get special treatment in this bill? I thought it was going to include some other Medicaid-related provisions to take care of a few states represented by more influential senators, among them Harry Reid himself.
November 20, 2009, 2:38 amMahan Atma says:
What, like the Republicans (and so-called “moderate” Dems from the red states) aren’t getting paid bucket-loads of money to oppose the bill??
November 20, 2009, 3:01 amneurodoc says:
Republicans, save perhaps the couple who may vote for the bill, may collect campaign contributions from those opposed to the bill, but those solons aren’t likely to see any pork for their states in it, that going to key Democrats.
November 20, 2009, 3:12 ampmorem says:
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
The details of policy, or even the subject at hand are not important. It doesn’t matter if the subject is health-care or some routine budget item. Those are just vehicles and window-dressing.
It’s the payoffs that are important. It’s the opportunities for special favors, kickbacks and graft.
It’s about buying votes, top to bottom.
November 20, 2009, 6:04 amTaxLawyer says:
Not to quibble (well, ok, to quibble), but the wordy definition of a “disaster-recovery FMAP adjustment State” (5 words), is found in new paragraph (aa)(2), and is 268 words long. The newly defined term is used 3 times, costing four extra words each time, for a total word cost of only 280. Still absurd, of course.
November 20, 2009, 7:23 amUnfortunately, this is common practice. Legislators do it all the time in a deliberate attempt to hide their venality. Check out the targeted transition provisions of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 sometime. (see, e.g., Pub. L. No. 99-514, § 204, 100 Stat. 2085(1986)).
Sarcastro says:
Wow, business as usual in DC sucks! And it has sucked since 1870! We shoulda stopped passing laws 140 years ago and quit before the corruption ruined everything.
November 20, 2009, 7:36 amfalafalafocus says:
Sarcastro is finally starting to talk some sense.
November 20, 2009, 7:48 amSarcastro says:
Yeah, stupid Civil Rights Acts, Antitrust legislation, Womens’ suffrage! What has the legislature ever done for us?
November 20, 2009, 8:15 amfalafalafocus says:
I thought didn’t know that the Civil Rights Act constituted one big pork barrel project (thanks for the heads up on that) and that that Womens’ suffrage was rolled into a constitutional amendment, not a statute (thanks for the information, btw).
I’m sure your note about Antitrust legislation also proves how valuable federal legislation is, but I’m not intelligent enough to figure it out.
But your point remains. Yay legislature!
November 20, 2009, 8:27 amGlenn Bowen says:
::so she sold out the rest of us cheap- she’s willing to cripple the country with socialist nonsense for a lousy 100 million dollars. Maybe that’s just her piece. Louisianans never have been known for acute intelligence, only laziness and corruption.
The state and it’s administrations have played the grasshopper to the taxpayer’s ant forever.
November 20, 2009, 9:16 amtheobromophile says:
I’m surprised that other Senators aren’t lining up to have the language changed just a bit to include their states. (Off the top of my head, California – with its wild fires and fiscal problems – seems like a great candidate for this, with just a few linguistic changes.)
November 20, 2009, 9:29 amDavid Nieporent says:
Not with taxpayer money, no; that wouldn’t even make any sense.
(You do understand that this is the problem here: not that Landrieu is being influenced, but that she’s being bought off with money that doesn’t belong to the buyers.)
November 20, 2009, 9:33 amSarcastro says:
Yep, no horse trading to get Civil RIghts passed, nosirree! And Womens’ sufferage was smooth sailing with no deals at all!
And who needs Antitrust after all? If that invisible hand wants to build a monopoly, then I say I get to play the hat!
November 20, 2009, 9:35 amSandy MacHoots says:
So you’re saying it’s a good thing that legislation be packed with financial goodies to help legislators get reelected. And that it be carefully concealed so that none of the rubes can figure out exactly what’s going on. It’s just far too much to expect a statesman to vote on a bill on the merits.
Can you point to any successful long-term monopolies that have not involved government coercion to make them effective? Standard Oil couldn’t have become the archetype of the monopoly if the government hadn’t enforced the very trust agreements that limited competition.
November 20, 2009, 9:49 amJMA says:
Sarcastro, setting aside the fact that you found only three bills to crow about in the past century or so…
It is then acceptable that these people get a (substantial!) amount of money for this job and yet still have to be bribed to do it?
November 20, 2009, 9:55 amDjDiverDan says:
The distinction, in case you can’t see it Mahan, is that the “bucket -loads” of money being paid to those opposing the bill ARE NOT BEING TAKEN FROM THE POCKETS OF TAXPAYERS THROUGH THE COERCIVE POWER OF GOVERNMENT TAXATION FOR THE PURPOSE OF REDISTRIBUTING THE FUNDS TO POLITICAL ALLIES FOR THE PURPOSE OF BUYING THEIR VOTES!
November 20, 2009, 10:13 amDavid Nieporent says:
What if they weren’t?
What you’re saying here, stripped of the sarcasm — which is only funny when you take a position to the extreme, not when you merely repeat the same argument with a snarky tone — is that if a bad process is used to implement a good law, then this somehow validates the bad process.
Which, in other words, is just a wordy way of saying “Ends justify the means.” Which is neither funny nor true.
Invisible hands don’t build monopolies; governments do. When invisible hands temporarily lead to monopoly, antitrust isn’t needed, because invisible hands will take them down again.
November 20, 2009, 10:18 amSarcastro says:
Lots of good points here.
There are all sorts of economists who think monopolies are not a natural result of unrestrained capitalism, they just keep real quiet for some reason. Microsoft and AT&T’s ability to ignore market forces was all the governments’ fault!
Other lame laws that prove we don’t need federal government:
fighting child porn,
national highways,
GI bill,
scientific research,
IP protection,
taking out Hitler,
keeping my cell phone from interfering with my radio,
keeping poison and poo out of my drinking water,
making sure medication doesn’t kill people,
the parks system, the internet,
FDIC
much of the Western US.
All this suucks because the government doesn’t function like it should in an ideal world! A pox on everything unperfect!
November 20, 2009, 10:22 amSarcastro says:
[Point taken, David Nieporent. It's hard to do the snarky substantive stuff anyhow. Colbert I ain't.
To be clear, I think deal making and pork are just about inevitable any government system and that any cure would likely be more damaging than the disease.
Furthermore, a lot of the outrage is hogwash - it's not lining the politicians' pockets, it's going to stuff in their district. That stuff may be more or less worthwhile, but the constituents do like it. Government you deserve and all that.
The main issue I have with pork is the general inefficiency of pumping all that money through the federal government and than back to the states. But using the Federal Government to help your specific constituents was kind of part of the deal when the US was made. The fact that part of that help is fat sacks of cash money I see as somewhat inevitable]
November 20, 2009, 10:31 amyankee says:
What’s the point of writing the bill that way? I can understand why a member of Congress would want to obscure the fact that a subsidy was designed so that only one specific corporation would qualify for it, but what’s the rationale for obscuring a special subsidy for Louisiana? Is it about some rule of Senate procedure?
November 20, 2009, 10:54 amneurodoc says:
Yes, and what is human that doesn’t eventually pass, hence the wisdom, “This too shall pass.”
The question is how soon they will pass, and whether we must or should wait until they do so on their own without any hastening by us. I believe that there are many things that would not pass nearly soon enough without such hastening, which sometimes must come from the government. (Is that blasphemy to a libertarian’s ears?)
(By the way, do “invisible hands” always work to bring about the most desirable ends? Did even Adam Smith believe they do?)
November 20, 2009, 11:29 amneurodoc says:
Perhaps we should stop here to recall Bismarck’s observation about laws being like sausage, with it best not to see either being made.
November 20, 2009, 11:32 amNickM says:
Some of it is lining the politicians’ pockets. Jack Murtha’s nephew Robert does very well by being the subcontractor that lots of contractors must hire (sort of like the guy sent by the local “Benevolent Neighborhood Association” to construction projects). Harry Reid, Ken Calvert, etc. push projects right near their landholdings. Bud Shuster was literally in bed with the highway industry lobby (that has monetary value – just ask Eliot Spitzer).
It’s also so difficult to track the money that there is great reason to fear that far more is being diverted to Congressmen and their friends and families.
Nick
November 20, 2009, 12:14 pmTerry Hart says:
This reminds me of the situation in the Pennsylvania State Legislature. The legislature is prohibited from passing legislation which targets a specific municipality, so they get around that prohibition by coming up with “general” legislation that is full of qualifiers which leave only the specific municipality affected by the bill. Stuff like: this bill only pertains to class-b municipalities in counties with a population over 500,000 next to counties which contain a state park and within 5 miles of a lake.
November 20, 2009, 2:54 pmSarcastro says:
[NickM what you describe is an outrage to be sure, but certainly de minimis compared to the amount of money flowing through politicians hands'. And again, how do you propose to end such patronage?]
November 20, 2009, 3:20 pmL Nettles says:
Shall we call this The Louisiana Purchase?
November 20, 2009, 4:05 pmegd says:
That’s the problem with having principled liberals like Boxer and Feinstein representing your state. They’re going to vote for left wing bills anyway, so there’s no need to bribe them.
Maybe some enterprising Californian will campaign on the platform of “I wouldn’t have voted for the health care bill without some major kickbacks to our state.” I think he [that is, the generic pronoun 'he', because I'm not talking about a group of people the use of the word 'they' doesn't make sense] would win more than a few votes.
Heck, he could even call himself a Republican, so the Senators selling us down the river can call it “bipartisan.”
November 20, 2009, 4:11 pmNickM says:
I agree that as a percentage of the budget it’s de minimis, though when you add up all the expenditures associated with some highway construction (e.g., Bridge to Nowhere), you’re talking about billions of dollars).
I don’t have good ways of dealing with some of those types of featherbedding. A properly functioning Congressional ethics process would have forced Shuster from his committee chairmanship, thus markedly decreasing what he could accomplish for his mistress’s employer. Murtha could probably be prosecuted. The more generalized ways of boosting the value of one’s property (nearby federal development projects) are where things start to get really difficult. I suppose you can create bright-line rules about distance from (and value of) landholdings, but those sweep both too broadly and too narrowly.
I don’t like the line-item veto for other reasons, but that might significantly cut down on spending of this nature.
Term limits (which I also don’t like for other reasons) might have some effect too – although they’d be more likely to cut down on “clean” pork rather than “personal pocket” pork.
At least at the state legislative level, my solution for district pork would be to abolish districting (how that could be done is too complex to explain here), but that doesn’t really work for Congress.
IMO aggressive enforcement of existing criminal laws (and harsh sentences for those convicted) may be by default the way to go. I don’t think many members of Congress want to risk a Cunningham- or Jefferson-length prison sentence.
Nick
November 20, 2009, 8:13 pmBrett Bellmore says:
Because it’s a violation of the “general welfare” clause. Granted, that clause is mostly dead except as a warped excuse to exercise unenumerated powers, but why take the chance that, if you violate it blatantly enough, the courts might feel compelled to enforce it?
November 21, 2009, 7:38 amRon Russell says:
Greeting from a native of the great sovereign state of Louisiana. Louisiana is often hard to describe, but the liberal attorneys in Washington have taken it to another level, but then politicians often “complicate the obvious while trivializing the momentous”. Found you site via a google search. Ya’ll come visit me sometimes at my extreme right wing blog TOTUS.
November 26, 2009, 7:14 pm