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When you’re in the business of tracking career politicians, like I am, one of the things you notice is how often the careerists lard their legislation with pork. Pork is payola. It’s spending on specific local projects at national taxpayer expense. It may be a statue or a football stadium or a military base that the military no longer needs. Anything that funds a narrow local interest without regard to the common good.

Politicians push pork not to promote the general welfare but to get reelected. There’s concrete evidence that it helps them do just that. One study classified first-​term representatives according to how much federal largesse flowed into their districts. It showed that, yes indeed, those who forked over the most pork won re-​election by the most comfortable margins. Those with the least pork increased their share of votes by an average 4.6 percentage points over what their first election. And those who hauled the most pork projects home added almost 9 percent to their vote.

So pork works, in a way. Some voters respond positively to it. And some special interest groups respond very positively by helping line a candidate’s campaign coffers. But it doesn’t really help most folks. The cities and states that get the most pork remain the poorest. And pork certainly doesn’t help politicians fulfill their genuine civic obligations as servants of the common good. It only helps them achieve one pork-​larded term in office after another. And who wants that?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Remember Harry Nilsson’s song “Without You”? You know: “I can’t live/​If living is without you.” Well, that’s exactly how career politicians in Congress feel when it comes to your sweet, cuddly tax dollars. They can’t live without ’em.

In fact, after 28 years in Washington, Republican Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete Domenici says Congress cannot live with an overall 4 percent increase in discretionary funding. Wait a second; I know we’ve heard our elected officials brag about being so fiscally responsible in the last couple years. They’ve actually got a budget surplus going. It’s amazing, though it’s nothing any fiscally irresponsible bum could fail to accomplish, if only he won the lottery. That’s what happened to the big-​spending career politicians. While they were busy piling up $200 billion dollar deficits every year, the economy expanded in a major way and tax revenues rained down on Washington like manna from heaven.

What to do with all this easy money? Well, the career politicians worked long hours on new ways to spend this money to increase their power and prestige. Give a politician money and he’ll find a way to spend it. And he’ll say it’s urgent, even in a booming economy. Of course, sooner or later, when the economy slows down, we will confront the same problem of putting the federal monster on a diet, except the monster will be bigger and fatter than ever. When that day comes, you can bet this monster will be looking for your wallet or your purse, not manna from heaven.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Thank goodness we live in a country where they can’t imprison you for speaking out. Too many governments just throw people in jail when they don’t like what they say. Fortunately, with new technologies like the Internet, it may be getting harder and harder to shut people up.

But governments still try. Even in communist China a lot of independent journalism has sprung up lately, helped by the advent of the Internet. But as you might expect, many of the stories make government officials uncomfortable, as freelance journalist Gao Qinrong discovered when he published a story about a fraudulent irrigation scheme. Now he’s serving a 12-​year sentence.

Same thing in Cuba, where two visitors from the Czech Republic recently found themselves cooped up in a Cuban jail for almost a month. The government feared they would spread tales of how the Czech people rebelled against tyranny. The Czechs say they were told again and again, “What happened in Central Europe will not succeed here.” Yeah, right. Something tells me that if throwing off the shackles of tyranny couldn’t possibly happen in Cuba, you wouldn’t need to lock people up to prevent it.

Thank goodness in America they don’t throw you in jail for saying the wrong thing. But there is that debate on the Senate floor on the McCain-​Feingold Campaign Finance Bill that would prevent people from mentioning the name of any congressman in any advertisement during the last 60 days before an election. Hmmmm. What’s that all about?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Experience. You know what that is. What you collect when you’re a career politician looking for ever more clever ways to spend other people’s money and complicate other people’s lives. “Oh, we need experienced legislators here!” cry the expert denizens of our state capitol buildings. “It takes decades to get up to speed, given how complicated we make the legislative process! Don’t term-​limit us! Heck, the freshmen take months just to find the bathroom. It would be chaos!” Or so says the career politician.

But let’s forget about bathrooms. Now it turns out that freshmen can’t even find the right elevator. Perhaps the problem is specific to Florida, where term limits are kicking into gear this session. It seems that no elevator in the Florida capitol building goes to every single floor, a setup that perplexes some of the new legislators.

When Florida voters passed term limits with a whopping 77 percent of the vote, they were saying that new ideas from the real world are more important than experience in the legislature, and that the courage to act on those ideas is more important than the perks of entrenched public office. And the track record in Arkansas, California, and other states shows that legislatures under term limits can greet newcomers and still get stuff done.

But maybe the Florida model offers hope for career politicians just the same. Maybe there’s a way careerists everywhere can rig the elevators, too, so that only those who have been studying the blueprints for 10 or 20 years can ever get to the right floor.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

You had to know they’ve been looking for it. Well, they’ve found it. Proof that term limits don’t work.

Oh, forget all the arguments politicians made when term limits were first being debated that it would create utter chaos, that state and local governments would simply grind to a halt due to the loss of experience. Aw shucks, that didn’t happen. Or that lobbyists would take over. Well, lobbyists are still moaning and groaning about it and urging legislators to repeal the limits. Not much of a sign they are exactly “taking over.” Then it was suggested that the California energy crisis was the fault of term limits. Now, that’s a really good try. But the legislation was passed before term limits removed a single legislator from office. In other words, that was the pros doing.

But if term limits seem like a big success and you think every sign points to the politicians being all wet, not to mention hopelessly self-​serving on the issue, just you wait. Proof has been found that term limits leads to, well, numbskull politicians who are just too darn soft on taxpayers. Former State Rep. Lynn Jondahl, a 22-​year veteran of the legislature says term limits don’t “make sense.” She points to a most serious sin committed by the inexperienced term-​limited legislature: phasing out the Single Business Tax that had been on the books for 29 years and become a major source of revenue. It’s gone. A tax actually repealed.

The politicians rest their case.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

In Missouri they say, “Show me!” Maybe they should make that the motto of Minnesota, too. That’s where a citizen legislator named Jesse Ventura, former wrestler, former actor, and present-​day XFL football announcer body slammed politics as usual and snagged the governor’s seat in 1998, despite fierce competition from two career politicians.

Minnesota is one of only 12 states without mandatory term limits on the governor. But Ventura believes in term limits and is adamant that he will not serve more than two terms. Minnesota is also the home state of U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone, currently serving his second term. Like Ventura, Wellstone promised to serve no more than two terms in his office. Except, guess what, he has just announced that he will indeed run for a third term as Senator.

I just hope the Senator one day finds his way back into the light. That may be sooner than he plans. A recent statewide poll shows that most Minnesotans, 55 percent, feel that Wellstone is morally obligated to step down in 2002. I guess that means Minnesotans still care about integrity, unlike Wellstone. And in a hypothetical 3‑way race between former Senator Rod Grams, Governor Ventura, and Wellstone, the poll hints that Ventura would edge out both competitors.

Ventura hasn’t said he’ll throw his hat in the ring. But we do know this. One, he’s a guy who means what he says, and will keep his term limit pledge. And two, he’s already won a three-​way political rassling match.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.