Michael Lissack million dollars extra to acquire and use. Currently, the Pentagon has a ten- year supply which it can use to overspend for the American taxpayer and increase pollution in Europe. Take, for instance, the rail projects funded with grants from the Urban Mass Transportation Administration. Everyplace that thinks of itself as a city wants one, but in only a very few densely packed urban areas does mass transit make sense. Still, there's a pot of money, so projects costing billions get built as long as they have patrons who know how to get the money. A study by UMTA found that a much-touted line in Jacksonville, Florida, attracts only 1,000 riders a day and serves as "a shuttle from a large parking lot to downtown." Miami's downtown people mover has been a costly bust. Both projects bear the fingerprints of William Lehman, chair- man of the Transportation Subcommittee in the House. Portland, land of Mark Hatfield, is building a rail line that will cost the government $20 per commuter trip and includes a provision that the federal government help in the development of a shopping center in order to give the line a place to go to. Towns like Austin, Texas, and Salt Lake City, Utah, have systems under way with $20-per-rider costs (UMTA thinks about $6 a ride is as high as subsidies should get), not because they have dense populations but because they have appropriators Phil Gramm and Jake Garn. But the best is Buffalo, where, thanks to Al D'Amato, an extension to its unsuccessful light-rail line is being built that will cost between $46 and $67 per trip. It would be cheaper to have limousines pick up Buffalo commuters at their homes and drive them to work. Such pervasive self-interest creates unending support for the web of pork barrel programs that affect whole blocks of congressmen such as subsidies for farm products, milk and timber, cheap power in the West, mass transit money for the cities, textile quotas and maritime grants. And then there's what some say is the hugest pork of all, the so-called entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare and student loans, which largely bene- fit the middle class and are considered so sacred that in recent years they have not even been touched. Yet these are the fastest-growing parts of the budget. They've been taken out of the budget process and made automatic,
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