Next time you are stuck in gridlock, think for a moment about your gas tax dollars going to benefit Wal-Mart, Rev. Pat Robertson, or real estate mogul Donald Trump. This may sound like a bad joke, but instead is part of the sad reality contained in the fine print of the transportation bill the President signed last week, a bill he should have vetoed without a second thought.

Along the way, this bill sends millions, if not billions, of your tax dollars to projects that will do absolutely nothing to increase the mobility of our nation, including transportation museums, recreational bike trails, and bridges in sparsely populated areas of Alaska. Rep. Don Young (R-AK), a supporter of two o these infamous bridges to nowhere, even took the opportunity to name one of the projects after himself. Yup, we are not kidding. Not only does the Knik Arm Crossing receive $231 million, it is also renamed Don Young’s Way.

No one made out better than the sparsely populated state of Alaska. Congress really did this bill Don Young’s Way, by raining down just over $1 billion for the 49th state. On a per capita basis, that’s nearly $1,600 for every man, woman, and child in Alaska, compared with about $86 per capita for the entire nation. Rep. Bill Thomas (R-CA), chairman of the very powerful House Ways and Means Committee, also did well in this bill. He secured $722 million for his hometown Bakersfield and the surrounding Kern County. This comes out to more than $1,000 per capita. Nearby Los Angeles, world-infamous for its gridlock, got about $64.

Congress didn’t wasn’t always this pork-crazy. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan vetoed a highway bill because it contained only 152 earmarks – which he thought was way too many. Eighteen years later, the number of earmarks has grown by more than 4,000%.

President Bush’s unwillingness to veto the transportation bill – even after lawmakers blatantly ignored his calls for fiscal responsibility and busted his spending cap by $2.5 billion – highlights one of the President’s most dismal streaks: he hasn’t vetoed a bill since he took office five years ago. We’re rooting for the President to break out of his veto slump soon – but we won’t hold our breath.

In addition to signing a bill too large for our deficit-challenged nation, the bill also contains a number of smoke and mirror provisions that hide its true cost. The most egregious example of this is a rescission, which takes back from states $8.5 billion in contract authority—think of this as promised, but unfunded, spending. By itself, this is not a bad idea, and could conceivably bring down the cost of the bill. However, Congress mandated the rescission occur on the last day of the bill’s life, effectively putting the hard work of taking these dollars back from states to a future Congress and a future administration. Since taking back these dollars is not a palatable decision anyway, it’s very likely that Congress will find a way to backfill this rescission and therefore increase the size of the bill by $8.5 billion.

The transportation bill was supposed to make the roads safer while cutting down on congestion on our highways. Somewhere along the way, however, this bill became the biggest congressional feeding frenzy of all time. While supporters of snowmobile trails in Vermont, horse trails in Virginia, and a documentary about the advances in infrastructure in Alaska are probably off celebrating their new projects, regular taxpayers have nothing to be happy about. They just got ripped off, thanks to a new transportation bill that sends this nation’s budget on a one-way road to ruin.