now with added alligators - the $1.3T omnibus snow job doesn't drain the swamp

That $1.3 trillion omnibus bill was passed in the USA, partly using a ticket to avert a further US government shutdown.

It doesn't drain the swamp, it just adds more alligators, mud, live oak, gumbo limbo, royal palm and sharp saw palmettos.

Firstly, check it out (here). The 2,232 pages are almost unreadable. It's built by weight. I expect they work out the consultant fee at so many thousand dollars per page. And the need for it to have the thud factor because its for $1.3 trillion.

There's no embedded tables, it uses arbitrarily split sentences, spaced on around 8 word numbered lines.

There's no headers and footers so you have to guess where a section starts. There's no proper summary. It has all the hallmarks of a snow job and a shopping list for vested interests. Just send your requests to our consultants and we'll put them through the obfuscation mill. Here's an example from the tax simplification area - the so-called General Deadwood Related Provisions:

Yikes.

Already the media headlines are about bike sheds New Jersey tunnels and the wall, although the really big money seems to go to the military. The Pentagon gets around $656 billion of the $1,300 billion. Some 50.4% of the total, but its buried away in Section C. The new ultra-hawkish John Bolton as national security advisor has previous form for wanting to bomb places, so watch out.

I decided to take a look at a simple area: the new warplanes being acquired as part of the defence upgrade. Here's my table:

I casually picked the first item to examine in more detail. F-35 planes. Lockheed had agreed to deliver them for 'less than $100m each'. Not so here, with a per unit cost of $113 million. Maybe it's somebody's handling fees? A kind of swamp tax.