|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Avarice and Consent
| Article
# : |
20542 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1992 |
2,843 Words |
| Author
: |
Deroy Murdock
New York writer Deroy Murdock is president of Loud & Clear
Communications, a marketing and media consultancy. He is a
correspondent for National Minority Politics magazine and
serves as adjunct fellow of the Atlas Economic Research
Foundation in Fairfax, Virginia. |
ADVENTURES IN PORKLAND HOW
Washington Wastes Your Money and Why They Won't Stop
Brian Kelly
New York: Villard Books, 1992
271 pp., $23.00
UNACCOUNTABLE CONGRESS
It Doesn't Add Up
Joseph J. DioGuardi
Washington: Regnery Gatewar, 1992
128 pp., $17.95
Take a quick peek at a few of the things you've paid for recently:
·Last year, the Agriculture Department spent $1 million to run a farm extension office in Washington, D.C. It offered cooking lessons to poor people.
·In 1991, a Pennsylvania college run by nuns won a $10 million grant to study stress in military families. The school president was surprised by this money and said she hadn't a clue how to spend it.
·By law, U.S. military bases in Europe must be heated with coal exported from Appalachia. It is crime to buy local coal or oil or convert base furnaces to burn oil. Despite a ten-year supply, the Pentagon buys 300,00 tons of coal--10 percent of
U.S. output--to ship overseas. Annual cost: over $100 million.
Feel like a victim of credit card fraud? Rest easy. This is just your federal government hard at work, distributing pork to those who ask for it, and even those who don't.
Just in time for this month's national elections, Brain Kelly has written Adventure in Porkland: How Washington Wastes Your Money and Why They Won't Stop. After interviewing rural citizens, urban bureaucrats, and Capitol Hill gnomes and taking a retina-boiling look at a wealth of federal documents, Kelly has produced an informative, insightful, and very funny look at how your tax money disappears. Adventures in must reading for voters who are deciding what to do at the ballot box to curb what Kelly calls "the ultimate power of Congress: the ability to take money out of people's
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
