The buck should stop in its own bill

Here's an idea: From now on, appropriations can only be attached to a bill that is in the same category of spending.

Want farm appropriations? Then you're going to have to attach them to (or put up a) farm bill, not the anti-Iraq-escalation bill.

The victims of Katrina/Rita still need help! Then attach it to or put up a bill for natural disasters and stick it on there.

Very often a good bill gets attached with far too many appropriations, lovingly referred to as "pork", unless it's for your state, and then it's called "good policy". Now, this is nothing new, and neither is the fact that supporters of a bill often have to turn away from it once it's covered with the Barnacles of the Committee Sea. (Someone, I can't think who, haha, said, "I voted for the $87B before I...", yeah, everybody sing.)

We also seem to have the problem of runaway spending. If you have a kid or were one, you know that if the kid keeps hitting the parents up for a dollar here and five dollars there, it's much harder to keep track than if the kid has an allowance. Allowances can be budgeted, tracked, and renegotiated; nickel-and-dime spending runs amok.

Nickel and dime, hah! How about $87B and $250M and, and, and...? This is how the spending since the Iraq war (and before it, since many so-called Afghanistan appropriations were really to prep for the Iraq war) has gone so completely haywire that people seem shocked to hear how it's added up. Just like the parent who suddenly realizes they've been handing their kid $500 a month instead of $50.

And not just in the war(s). Does anyone really know how much we spend on agriculture? Transportation? Education? Disasters? You'd have to do a lot of research I would think to compile every bit of appropriations from all the many bills to really add it up, and it seems like a lot of folks just don't bother. The war spending is something that attracts attention, and so people have been trying to research the facts and educate the public-- but what you see there is emblematic of the way spending is handled all over the federal government. And all of this has worked so well in favor of the politicians, who can stick spending here and there and hide it from us in a three-card monte game.

So, bills with Barnacles, spending run amok, and a shell game. One fix: limit spending to bills of the same category.

First, the bills that are for important issues like war won't get bogged down with the Bridge to Nowhere. (Well, and silly bills won't either, I guess.)

Second, we can finally track and responsibly allocate money to different arenas while keeping a good handle of what we've spent already and to what end. Want a bridge? I mean, in all fairness, the 50 people who live on that island don't think it's "nowhere". But let's weigh it with all of our other transporation spending, see if it's a priority, check to see if we can afford to spend more, then allocate funds or put them off for another try next year.

Third, (which is an extension of the last point) we can keep our eye on those who are trying to hide money from us by spreading it around through so many bills, because they just won't be allowed to do that any more.

I'm not advocating that we have one bill for each item to spend money on (you can't have a bill for each bridge that someone wants to build, it would be too many bills), but just that when appropriations are attached or grouped together, that they are grouped by spending category. Farm bills are farm bills.

This seems like such a simple fix. Either there is something wrong with it that I haven't thought of, in which case please tell me in the comments section, or politicians won't listen because... they're crooks? Can't think of why else they wouldn't support it.

Now it's on you. Tell me why I'm wrong, or go tell your elected representatives that you want to see spending limited to bills of its own category.