Yup ... the porkers are stirring. Look! There they are approaching the taxpayer trough yet again. After all ... an election is on the horizon. This election, though, is a bit different for Democrats. They definitely don't want to go to their home districts and run on a national agenda. Their survival may well depend on separating themselves from Obama's big-government movement. So ... tout the pork! Democrats are going into their home districts and saying "Look at this sidewalk? Look at this pedestrian bridge! Look at this new community center! I did these things for you! Don't you want to send me back to Washington?"

The problem here is that these politicians and their constitutions just can't see a pedestrian bridge or a weasel crossing under a road in some national park as being so expensive that it really had anything at all to do with our increasing debt. Maybe the politicians know better .. but the voters may not.

Are you one of those Americans who suffer from thousands of dollars of credit card debt? Think about this now ... you have an $8,000 balance on your credit card and really nothing to show for it. You can't point to any one large purchase that created this burdensome debt load. If you check your statements you'll see that you created that debt bit-by-bit. There's a $40 fill-up at the gas station here, $35 in groceries there. Then you charge some movie theatre tickets and the next day it's $4.60 at Starbucks. None of these expenditures are going to bury you ... but time goes by, the charges add up, and suddenly you're sitting there trying to figure out how you got in this situation.

Same thing for government and our national debt. That pedestrian sky bridge in El Paso, or that new composting restroom in a Madison, Wisconsin park aren't exactly going to break the bank. But you get 435 members of the House, toss in 100 Senators ... every one of them trying to impress the local voters with these pork items ... and suddenly things are out of control.

I have something that could lead to a fix. I've been proposing this for years. I actually managed to have something like this introduced as legislation in the Georgia General Assembly about 10 years ago .. and it went nowhere. I just call it the "Taxpayer's Addendum."

How does it work? Well, let's apply it to congressional pork. I would propose that every single time a lawmaker proposes an earmark as part of an appropriations bill in Washington the request must be in writing and the Taxpayer's Addendum should be added to the request. Here's how it might read:

"I, ___ (politician's name) ________ do hereby swear and affirm that it is my considered position and belief that it is more important for the government to spend the necessary sums for the completion of the project outlined herein than it would be for the person who actually worked for and earned these funds to be permitted to retain those funds for the payment of their person expenses; including expenses related to basic necessities of life such as food, transportation, shelter, clothing and healthcare."

How many of these politicians do you think would be willing to actually walk up to a wage earner and physically take the money out of that person's pocket to pay for some of this pork? Yeah ... the number would be somewhere near zero I suspect.