I think you are wrong on this. Pork is derived from pork barreling, which describes political concessions who are locally beneficial, but have no real benefit nationwide.
This isn't about etymology, and also it's an oversimplification of what "pork barrelling" really is.
A
lot of local infrastructure projects are or can be "pork" within the context of legislative democracy, simply because the immediate benefits are concentrated in a single place. That doesn't mean the project has no real benefit to the system as a whole, and it absolutely doesn't mean that the
aggregate of all the projects has no benefit to the system as a whole. Every new bridge is "pork" in the sense that mostly benefits the people who live close to that particular river and want to cross it regularly, but that doesn't mean that funding a nationwide program of "build more bridges" is wasteful spending for the country as a whole. Because
everyone needs a slice of that pork, even if no one slice can be fed to every person at the same time.
...
Indeed, measures nominally taken to limit "pork-barrel politics" in the United States have arguably damaged the overall health of US infrastructure over the past thirty years. Nowadays, it's harder for legislators to get infrastructure improvements or even basic maintenance done in their districts. It shifts the legislature's incentives very firmly away from "get things built that you can take credit for with your constituents" to "cut the budget so you can tell your constituents that you've lowered taxes and eliminated waste." And then those same voters wonder twenty years later why the rickety old bridges haven't been replaced.
[One can argue that this was an intentional move by Gingrich's generation of GOP leadership, who were specifically trying to remake the system with themselves in charge of an intensely polarized "small government" party whose members could not be 'bought' by the promise of actually getting things done in their own districts for their own voters, thus over time leaving those voters less and less disposed to vote for government initiatives, and more and more disposed to blame culture war topics for the economic malaise they
mysteriously wind up suffering.]
In regards to water distribution being tagged as pork, was that the rural ones near the beginning of Voz term? I remember him considering those useless before changing his mind after seeing their positive impact.
Let's look at the list of projects that were labeled "Pork" in late 1960.
Moscow and Leningrad Renovations: These projects clearly have localized benefits, but we've seen that the cities in question had genuine problems caused by aging or obsolete infrastructure, such as traffic jams blocking the roads right outside where the Supreme Soviet meets because the road wasn't wide enough for cars to pass a bus that had stopped in front of the building. Kind of ridiculous when you think about it.
Secondary City Metro Lines Stage 5: Again, benefits are localized, but it wouldn't be reasonable to claim that having proper mass transit in Kazan, Chelyabinsk, and Odessa is
worthless or not beneficial. I was hesitant to complete the project at the time, granted, but that was because there was a lot else to do.
Consumable Product Initiatives Stage 1: This is an obvious example of a project that is "pork" because it's very popular with the legislature as a whole, but which clearly impacts most if not all Soviet citizens...
in a way they would appreciate and like! It's politically popular because it's
actually popular, and while the USSR is not really a democracy, it's got enough democratic elements that
occasionally the Supreme Soviet emerges from indulging its heavy industry fetish and recognizes that making people happy by giving them access to new and better consumer goods is important.
Television Production Plants Stage 3: Here, you can argue that this is more of a pure luxury good, yes. But it's a luxury good for the masses, and it's one that is available across much of the Union once the increased access to televisions spreads. Here, too, we see that a project is labeled "pork" because it is
highly popular, not because it is something the Supreme Soviet is effectively paying political capital to bribe us into doing despite being inefficient and irrelevant to the general interests and wishes of the public.
I could check some other years, but I'm on a bit of a time crunch. I expect, though, that you'll see the same things. The projects labeled "pork" may not always be exactly the things we think are most important, but very often they're important for reasons that will help a lot of people, or at least make a lot of people happy. Something steel mills and power plants and oil refineries do not do, or at least do not do directly.
