the.com/pork barrel
Government spending that buys votes, wrapped in a bridge or a bowling alley.
means Government funding for local pet projects that politicians secure mainly to please (and keep) their voters, not because the nation needs it most.
from The phrase comes from pre-Civil War America, when plantation owners kept salt pork in large barrels and doled it out to enslaved workers — a scene of a crowd scrambling for rationed shares. By the late 1800s, newspapers and politicians had borrowed that image of a mad grab for a limited supply to describe legislators scrambling to carve out federal money for their home districts, and 'pork barrel' stuck as shorthand for that scramble.
- origin
- from literal barrels of salt pork doled out to slaves
- classic example
- Alaska's Bridge to Nowhere, $398 million, never built
- modern name
- earmarks, same meat, fancier packaging
- why it persists
- local goodies buy votes for unrelated bills