Citizens Against Government Waste determined that there was $14.5 billion in total pork-barrel spending during the 104th Congress, up 16 percent from the previous session. Items included:

• $3.5 million for "wood utilization research"
• $445,000 for "improved fruit practices"
• $4 million for the Gambling Impact Study Commission
• $330,000 for Stellar Sea Lion research
• $5 million for the National Defense Center for Environmental Excellence
• $4 million for the Discovery Center of Science and Technology
• $2 million for an International Fertilizer Development Center
• $3 million for the George H.W. Bush Fellowship
• $3 million for buses and bus facilities in Williamsport and Scranton, Pennsylvania

†

Following the enactment of Ohio's 1995 welfare reform, which required welfare recipients to work or perform community service while looking for a permanent job in order to receive benefits, Arnold Tompkins, Ohio Director of Human Services, found that a "smokeout effect" had taken place, in which recipients who had been fraudulently working while receiving benefits were forced out into the open. "When you start requiring a lot of people that you didn't require before, [you find that recipients] did have jobs and things before that weren't reported income and things like that. And when you're requiring them to do 20 hours of work or 15 hours of work—they then [say]—"I can't do that because I've got another job." Tompkins estimates that as much as one-third of the drop in welfare claims in Ohio could be a result of previously undetected fraud.

†

Associate professor of English Jeffrey F. Huntsman in a letter to the editor of the Herald Times of Bloomington, Indiana, March 2, 1997:

I have taught general linguistics, including grammar and usage, to prospective teachers of English for nearly thirty years. I was therefore deeply distressed to find your otherwise potentially useful article "Grammar 101" poisoned by such obsolete, prejudicial, and ultimately damaging terms as "proper/improper," "correct/incorrect," and "good/bad." These terms are at best counterproductive, because they belong respectively to systems of manners, logic, and ethics, not to the socially constrained system of language.

Instead, we should use less judgmental terms, like "standard," and "conventional," and, most useful, "appropriate." I do not mean to suggest that society does not have certain expectations with respect to language usage—quite the contrary. Those expectations, although often arbitrary and capricious, are very real. But such expectations can be recognized and described in ways that do not demean people by using diction that treats them as deficient, diseased, damaged, or depraved. People generally do not like to be attacked, especially about something as intimately identifying as their language....

†