Customer Reviews

The Pig Book: How Government Wastes Your Money

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

The Pig Book is the best compilation of pork-barrel spending that I have ever seen. The book is enjoyable to read, and provides some outrageous examples of what Congress is doing with our money. It takes a serious subject and makes it understandable to everyone. Citizens Against Government Waste deserves a lot of credit for taking on the big spenders in Washington. I agree with Sen. John McCain that this book should be read by everyone in America!

I read part of the book and seems to me the ones who wrote it had no idea what they are talking about. For example, it is naive to believe that we keep the screwworm erradicated from the U.S magically. There is a lot of work involved in this mission and they have no idea. The money spent in Screwworm program save the economy 100s of millions per year and keep our animals and enven humans free of this terrible infestation of larvae best known as man eater. To keep the US free of screwworm, 40 millions sterile flies per week must be produced in a factory and release it to the environemnt by plane. This is a complex operations and any research done to minimize the cost of these operations is worth it. If we do not produce sterile flies they will fly to the united states soon and invade the country again. Because what they are saying about screwworm is Naive...(ask livestock producers in Texas) everything else is probably naive. It is too bad that people make money writting this books that probably have no sense of reality.

Citizens Against Government Waste, The Pig Book: How Government Wastes Your Money (St. Martin's, 2005)

Another book designed to raise your blood pressure while educating you, though it must be noted up front that anyone who reads this will probably wonder how some of these things are wastes of money. CAGW are, as long as it's not a major project (for some reason, they completely fail to note HIPAA, the single largest governmental waste of money ever conceived), equal-opportunity destroyers. That said, on the other side of the equation, you're certain to find millions upon millions of dollars that will make you wonder what on Earth Congress was thinking. After all, it doesn't take just one idiot to get the government to invest millions of dollars into projects that are, at best, useless redundancies. People have to vote on this stuff, y'know?

I'll admit that my number one complaint about this book has little to do with the book itself. I get annoyed at the kind of forced anonymity thing implied by an "author" named Citizens Against Government Waste. And far from the note at the end telling you who the editors of the book actually were mollifying me, it just seemed to make it all the more irritating. You guys put it together? For god's sake, take the credit. It's not like you were going for anonymity if you put your names in the back of the book, right? And it does still nag that CAGW were unwilling to attack HIPAA, which in its first year alone wasted more money than all the projects in this book put together, while attacking such relatively harmless projects as the Steamtown Museum (one wonders how a project that was widely considered "a godsend" to the local economy--a characterization which the book's editors do not at all dispute--is a horrible thing. Though, yeah, it would have been nice had Pennsylvania paid the money back eventually...). But other than those niggles, worth it. *** ½

All American voters need to read this and act! Congress is running away with our money

Great book, showed just how congress is ripping the tax payer off. Everyone should read it. It is totally non partisan.

This book is all about small silly items that really don't make a bit of difference when compaired with a day in the Iraq war.