Pork Everywhere

Bush signed into law the Highway Bill. Yet another reason to hate government. The small town of Ketchikan (population 15000) just got a grant from the federal government for $223 million for a bridge that goes nowhere. And that is just one of many cases where government is wasting YOUR money. That's right, you are paying for that bridge.

I hate the idea that to get anything done in this country, you have to grease the wheels and allow the representatives of our country to get pet projects for their districts. Whatever happened to just doing the right thing?

The problem with a large, national government is that everybody's money gets put into one big pot and then it is parceled out with some people having power disproportionate to the constituents they represent. To get a road built in highly populous California for millions of people, you have to give something to the guy who represents 5 people in the state of Alaska. It's just ridiculous.

Imagine a company where IT decisions are made by each department head and resources are allocated by who has more pull. It just so happens that the Sales department in this fictitious company has the most pull. It comes time to buy new computers. The Sales department, being the most persuasive, gets all the new computers assigned to them and their friends in Facilities; nobody in either department really needs it for anything more than surfing the web and playing Free Cell. The guys in the engineering department, who need powerful computers to run CAD software or CPU intensive development environments are now left to choose between the 266 and 333 MHZ Pentium II's that are left. Doesn't sound like a very good plan does it, but in many respects that is how the government is run.

I hate to keep harping on it but we need to reduce the size and scope of the government. When you give these children so much money to play with, they treat it as if it will last forever and they can spend it on whatever they want. Giving them more money doesn't work, it just makes them buy bigger toys.