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What's The Pig Book, you ask?

The projects in this year's Congressional Pig Book Summary symbolize the most blatant examples of pork spending by the Federal Government. As in previous years, all the items in the Congressional Pig Book meet at least one of Citizens Against Government Waste's seven criteria, but most satisfy at least two:

** Requested by only one chamber of Congress;
** Not specifically authorized;
** Not competitively awarded;
** Not requested by the President;
** Greatly exceeds the President’s budget request or the previous year’s funding;
** Not the subject of congressional hearings; or
** Serves only a local or special interest.

Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) is a private, non-partisan, non-profit organization representing more than one million members and supporters nationwide. CAGW's mission is to eliminate waste, mismanagement, and inefficiency in the federal government.

You'll note that although on paper there's been a massive reduction in earmarks in 2012, there are still plenty that have been written into law; our Representatives just took their names off the legislation. CAGW had to root around for many of them, but one of the biggest has been out there in plain site:

$255,000,000 for continued upgrade of the M1 Abrams tank to the M1A2SEP variant, despite DOD's proposal to suspend tank production until 2017 in order to achieve savings. According to a December 16, 2011, article in the Daily Tribune, supporters of the upgrade warned that "idling the program as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars wind down would jeopardize tens of thousands of jobs at more than 560 businesses across the nation."

And isn't that something? The Defense Department doesn't want us to spend $250 million on the tank, but our representatives want to ram it through anyway, since it's really nothing but a jobs bill.

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