We Don't Get Pork - We Get PORKED!!

My position on pork, of course, is that we should try to keep the entire pork pie SMALL (indeed, since all the taxpayers collectively are getting PORKED by pork) but try to get as big a piece for our district as possible.

However, Citizens Against Government Waste doesn't seem to think the average Texas Congressional Representative is doing a very good job of getting a piece of pork for our district. As their table shows, In 2002, we were only 44th in the nation, but went up to 40th in 2003. Granted, the average American only got $34.33 in pork back from Congress, but Texas in 2003 only got $23.09. Thus the average American got almost 49% more pork than the average Texan! Of course, it's pretty obvious why the average Texas Representative is doing such a lousy job. There is a phenomenon called log rolling. For example, if our delegation were smart, we'd give up one bill we shouldn't value much, like torturing prisoners or staying in Iraq forever, to get some economic benefits for our district. Instead, we clutch onto bills like torturing prisoners and staying in Iraq forever in exchange for giving all our money to other states. They like that arrangement, and our delegation seems to like that arrangement.

I don't.

By the way, while you may have heard that 'Red States' tend to take money from 'Blue States' it turns out that there are some pretty major exceptions, and Texas is one of them. In a book called The Great Divide: Retro versus Metro the author John Sperling mentions that Texas gets ripped off big time as one of the 'Retro' states which usually gain from 'Metro' states but not always. The author's Retro versus Metro roughly correlates with Red versus Blue, though not entirely.