The King and Queen of Pork Earmarks

| No Comments
A nice article at The Examiner about a dinner that John and Joyce Murtha are holding in Washington:
Editorial: Oink! Oink! Murtha�s porkfest
Rep. John Murtha is hosting a gala dinner tonight at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Pentagon City for defense industry lobbyists who have received and who hope to receive millions of tax dollars via earmarks sponsored by the Pennsylvania Democrat.

Murtha is one of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi�s closest allies and one of the leading earmarkers in Congress. Tickets for the �Evening with Jack and Joyce Murtha� dinner cost $1,500 per person. Murtha and cohorts like Rep. James Moran, D-Va., and Rep. Peter Visclosky, D-Ind., have refined the earmark-for-a-contribution process to a fine art. A Roll Call investigation last year found, with assistance from Taxpayers for Common Sense and the Sunlight Foundation, that the three Democrats funneled millions of dollars in earmarks for firms whose executives then contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to their re-election campaigns.

But Murtha�s porkfest is not going unnoticed. Three conservative citizen activist groups and a conservative blog that are active in the anti-earmark Porkbusters movement are gathering protesters, posters and pigs and plan to crash the Murtha pork bash.

RedState.com is the blog that put out the original call for protests. The responding groups are Americans for Prosperity, Citizens Against Government Waste and the National Taxpayers Union.
Cool that there is a demonstration. I hope that someone is taking photos of the people attending this "gala" -- I love the line:
the three Democrats funneled millions of dollars in earmarks for firms whose executives then contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to their re-election campaigns
I recently read a book about a proposed FairTax which replaces the IRS and the Employment tax with a flat 23% tax on goods and services sold in the USA. If you buy a house that has been built for you, you will be paying that tax. If you buy a used house, you will not. Same thing with cars and other durable goods. The authors of the book pointed out that one side-effect of this would be to open up the earmarking process and shine some light on it since Congress and the House would not be able to have direct control over the funds generated by the FairTax. The 23% was chosen as it is the embedded tax in anything sold in the USA these days. If you buy a loaf of bread, the tractor maker paid tax on the steel they bought and passed it on to the farmer who paid taxes and passed them on to the miller who passed them on to the baker, the distributor, the store and finally to you. All of these add up to about 23%.

Leave a comment

October 2022

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
            1
2 3 4 5 6 7 8
9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 28 29
30 31          

Environment and Climate
AccuWeather
Cliff Mass Weather Blog
Climate Depot
Ice Age Now
ICECAP
Jennifer Marohasy
Solar Cycle 24
Space Weather
Watts Up With That?


Science and Medicine
Junk Science
Life in the Fast Lane
Luboš Motl
Medgadget
Next Big Future
PhysOrg.com


Geek Stuff
Ars Technica
Boing Boing
Don Lancaster's Guru's Lair
Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories
FAIL Blog
Hack a Day
Kevin Kelly - Cool Tools
Neatorama
Slashdot: News for nerds
The Register
The Daily WTF


Comics
Achewood
The Argyle Sweater
Chip Bok
Broadside Cartoons
Day by Day
Dilbert
Medium Large
Michael Ramirez
Prickly City
Tundra
User Friendly
Vexarr
What The Duck
Wondermark
xkcd


NO WAI! WTF?¿?¿
Awkward Family Photos
Cake Wrecks
Not Always Right
Sober in a Nightclub
You Drive What?


Business and Economics
The Austrian Economists
Carpe Diem
Coyote Blog


Photography and Art
Digital Photography Review
DIYPhotography
James Gurney
Joe McNally's Blog
PetaPixel
photo.net
Shorpy
Strobist
The Online Photographer


Blogrolling
A Western Heart
AMCGLTD.COM
American Digest
The AnarchAngel
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler
Babalu Blog
Belmont Club
Bayou Renaissance Man
Classical Values
Cobb
Cold Fury
David Limbaugh
Defense Technology
Doug Ross @ Journal
Grouchy Old Cripple
Instapundit
iowahawk
Irons in the Fire
James Lileks
Lowering the Bar
Maggie's Farm
Marginal Revolution
Michael J. Totten
Mostly Cajun
Neanderpundit
neo-neocon
Power Line
ProfessorBainbridge.com
Questions and Observations
Rachel Lucas
Roger L. Simon
Samizdata.net
Sense of Events
Sound Politics
The Strata-Sphere
The Smallest Minority
The Volokh Conspiracy
Tim Blair
Velociworld
Weasel Zippers
WILLisms.com
Wizbang


Gone but not Forgotten...
A Coyote at the Dog Show
Bad Eagle
Steven DenBeste
democrats give conservatives indigestion
Allah
BigPictureSmallOffice
Cox and Forkum
The Diplomad
Priorities & Frivolities
Gut Rumbles
Mean Mr. Mustard 2.0
MegaPundit
Masamune
Neptunus Lex
Other Side of Kim
Publicola
Ramblings' Journal
Sgt. Stryker
shining full plate and a good broadsword
A Physicist's Perspective
The Daily Demarche
Wayne's Online Newsletter

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by DaveH published on February 27, 2008 8:35 PM.

Where did Lafayette Ronald Hubbard get his idea for Scientology? was the previous entry in this blog.

Awwww Cute is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Monthly Archives

Pages

OpenID accepted here Learn more about OpenID
Powered by Movable Type 5.2.9