The Whole Hog Special Interest Sandwich

What's the difference between pork and bacon? In a sociopolitical-inedible context, pork is the prize our Potomac politicos pass out to their henchmen hacks back home after digging their digits into the pockets of the people they pretend to represent (i.e., "pork-barrel politics") while bacon is the reward of working for an honest wage (i.e., "bringing home the bacon").

When the US Congrasp passed its purported "corporate tax reform bill" (aka corporate welfare giveaway) in October, conservative columnist Doug Thompson rightly ripped the rats in his Capitol Hill Blue e-column. But his shopping cart of abuses included both pork and bacon.

One of his pork examples was a bill for 231 million taxbucks to finance selected privately owned shopping malls in Syracuse, Shreveport, Atlanta and Lakewood, Colorado. This is classic pork; carving choice chops from everyone's piggybanks to benefit a favored few.

But Thompson also includes multimillion-dollar tax breaks for aircraft manufacturers, railroads and archery companies as examples of pork. But a tax break is not pork. A tax break is deciding to let an honest wage earner take all of his hard-earned bacon home. And "allowing" folks to keep their own bacon is not the same as heisting ham hocks from someone else and passing them on to the politician's pet porkers. Libertarians should never squeal when people get to keep what's rightfully theirs. When just a mere piglet, I remember people complaining that churches ought to be taxed: "If I have to pay taxes, so should they." But once I became libertarianized I realized that those people had it exactly backwards. The idea that all guinea pigs should get gutted equally is a pigheaded idea of justice. The correct response is: "Everyone should get the same tax break that churches get."

But let's chew the fatback about this. Are there really any corporate "honest wage earners" left in America? Don't we know that those industries got their tax breaks by shoving their snouts beneath the curly tails of the Senate Swine and the House Hogs on The Hill? Didn't they enliven lobbyists' lifestyles with tens of thousands to buy their millions in tax breaks? Didn't they drop big bills in the campaign pots of the politicos to get the tax break bills they wanted?

Take another pork example. NASCAR track owners were given the checkered flag for a $101 million provision to write off the cost of grandstands over seven years. On its face, this isn't pork. The Capitol crooks didn't toss them any of our taxbucks. An automotively motivated entrepreneur comes along, constructs a racetrack and builds his bleachers. In a free wheeling free market free society He wouldn't be taxed, now or seven years from now, to pay for other people's free rides on welfare. If he profits from risking his own riches he's not gorging on pork, he's bringin' home the bacon.

And now for a word from Reality: every business boss in America today who makes more than pig feed is politically plugged in. You can bet your pork belly futures that our NASCAR nabob was part of an open conspiracy known as the public-private partnership. Local politicos piled massive tax incentives (public bribery like special credits, abatements, exemptions, enterprise zones) into his hog trough to get him to build in their precinct. The land was likely stolen for him (property snatching through zoning laws, land management, condemnation, eminent domain, smart growth, urban development, regional planning, blight reduction).

Letting Boss Hogg off the hook for taxes becomes pork when our bacon takes the tax hit to make up for his shortfall.

What we end up with is the Whole Hog Special Interest Sandwich: a loin of bacon-wrapped pork stuffed between a slice of public bread and a slice of private bread. Taxation transforms our bacon into the Business Bastard's Blue Plate Pork Special.

Taxpayers for Common Sense saw this Congressional pork-barreling as a missed opportunity for "finding new revenues to lower the deficit." These are more folks who have it exactly backwards. Screw new revenues; eradicate old expenditures instead. Abolish agencies and offices, bureaus and branches, departments and divisions, along with their tens of thousands of bureaucrats, civil servants, administrators, hacks and hangers on. Pay off deficits and regain freedom. That would be the ultimate benefit package.

Finally, then, here's the difference between bacon and pork: as long as the nation's powercrats have free reign to carve a tax from our backs, our bacon will always be their pork.

Taxation: the other white meat.