Is there a longer discussion of this that you can link somewhere? I remember the phrase as a derogatory commonplace in adults' political discussion when I was a child, but the concept seems to have drifted out of the discourse since, and having now had my attention drawn to its absence I'd be interested to find out more about why.
There's definitely still pork. I mean, look at how many pet projects were included in Covid relief funding. Pork is the idea of stuffing an unrelated project to benefit your local district or state (and thus, the politician's reelection chances) into a bigger bill that is unrelated to that expense. Like the most famous one was the Alaskan "bridge to nowhere" that would have cost $400 million: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravina_Island_Bridge
That dates to 2005, so you are not really contradicting grandparent's point that this was mostly outlawed in 2011 (and that this has accelerated hyperpartisanship by removing an incentive for compromise).
Grandparent never pointed to what law they were talking about. They just made an offhanded, unverified remark. I also pointed out that a lot superfluous pork was included in Covid funding. "Pork" was never outlawed. It's not even a formally defined thing. If you think politicians can't figure out how to wiggle pet projects into huge multi trillion dollar spending bills then you really ought to tune into C-Span more often.
This is the outdated proposal that didn't pass. But the current proposal is double this. I've tried to tune out politics for a while but you can be sure that pork is in a $1.9 trillion spending bill as sure as the sun rises.
Is there a longer discussion of this that you can link somewhere? I remember the phrase as a derogatory commonplace in adults' political discussion when I was a child, but the concept seems to have drifted out of the discourse since, and having now had my attention drawn to its absence I'd be interested to find out more about why.