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| Yes | 85% | 74 votes | Total: 87 votes | |
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Add to FavoritesCongress acts like a child in the supermarket. How many parents can identify with this situation? As you approach the check out lane, you have to unload all the junk items your child has snuck into the cart. Then you have an embarrassing confrontation with your child as he or she has a major melt down and insists you buy the candy, the toy, or something else not on the grocery list. When will our representatives start acting like grown ups instead of children? When will they stop trying to sneak their junk programs into our bills?
Pork barrel earmarking must stop. Although some earmarks may have their merits, many earmarks do not directly benefit the majority of Americans. At best, they benefit only a few.
At worst, they represent a corruption of power. If a budgetary request has merit, let it stand on its own where it can get the attention and scrutiny it deserves.
In the present financial climate, Americans are being required to make tough decisions. They are having to dig deep to pay for the gas to get to work, the funds to keep their mortgage commitments current, the money to pay for skyrocketing grocery bills. Currently most Americans are just trying to survive.
Americans are cutting coupons, digging through their belongings to see what they can sell in a garage sale or on e-Bay, cutting off land line phone service, shopping thrift stores, and doing anything else to keep the bills down. Many families are losing their homes.
In light of this, I cannot believe that our elected officials have the nerve to say that there is no time to fully examine every earmarked spending request. Maybe there would be time if they shrug off golf games or cocktail parties. Perhaps they could offer to work overtime to do their duty. Certainly Americans are expected to do whatever it takes to pay their tax bills.
Yet, when a bill was proposed to have a moratorium on earmarks, Congress voted it down.
In fact, there were 30,000 some requests for earmarks for the 2008 federal budget and 13,000 made the cut.
Although there is more transparency in earmarked spending, the sheer volume of requests makes it nearly impossible to control wasteful spending and to fully make a thoughtful judgment of each request. This is a situation ripe for abuse and frivolous spending. Certainly most Americans have heard of the bridge to nowhere. But there are so many other earmarks that have found their way into legislation that are just as ridiculous.
The group Taxpayers for Common Sense is working very hard to shed light on wasteful government spending. A trip to their Web site is enlightening and also disturbing. Millions upon millions of dollars are being spent on pet projects such as painting an image of a salmon on a plane, sponsoring lavish parties, upgrading plane tickets, funding building projects with huge overruns, funding pet projects for which Congress member's have a personal interest, purchasing equipment that turns up missing, funding scientific studies that have questionable merit, and the list goes on and on.
At a time when our federal deficit is growing exponentially, inflation is double digit in some areas, and our social security system is at risk of collapse, there is no room for any waste. We can't just keep printing money. And we certainly can't depend on the American consumer to buy us out of our troubles with their tax stimulus packages. Fiscal restraint must come from the top.
Learn more about this author, Elizabeth Wordsmith.
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No
Arguing for a simple, across the board elimination of federal earmarks has recently trumped mom and apple pie as the easiest americanpoliticaltri ck in the book. Even the greenest pundit can get the froth bubbling at the corners of his mouth and rile up the masses with calls for "an end to wasteful, pork barrel spending!"So-called anti-pork crusaders would have you believe that every earmark is a "bridge to nowhere" and that every taxpayer struggling to pay her bills could be sitting pretty if only Congress would do away with earmarks altogether. The truth, as usual, is much more complicated. But pundits aren't in the business of truth; they're in the business of winning arguments.All it takes to get the crowd roaringisamodicum of rhetorical skill and an appeal to two things Americans fear above all: a sense of being on the wrong side of injustice and a nightmare vision of a thinning wallet.
Let's start at the top of the priority list: the American wallet. Be warned: this involves some simple math. Even the least choleric critics note that earmarks cost taxpayers money and that this money amounts to large, frightening numbers. According toCitizens Against Government Waste funded "11,610 projects at a cost of $17.2 billion in the 12 Appropriations Acts for fiscal 2008." Sounds terrible! But wait. This amounts to less than $125 on average for the 138 million U.S. taxpayers (2007 IRS estimate) and, of course, the actual amount is much less for lower and middle income taxpayers.
Moving on to injustice. Put simply, why should the people in [state you don't live in] receive federal funds for [project you can't imagine yourself using]? Perhaps they shouldn't. And perhaps people in [state you don't live in] shouldn't have to pay for safety at the airport near where you live and why, come to think of it, should people in the plains states pay for the Coast Guard? The point being that unfairness is distributed nto only throughout the country but also throughout the appropriations process. It isn't only earmarks that are unfair. The gross overspending of the entire budget is unfair.
Which brings us back to the wallet. This time the biggest one on earth.
According to the Office of Management and Budget, Fiscal Year 2008 saw U.S. federal government spending of $2.9 trillion of which $17.2 billion went to earmarks. This accounts for considerably less than one percent of total FY 2008 spending. In contrast,$261 billion was spent in Fiscal Year 2008 paying off the interest on the National Debt alone. Nine percent. The majority of spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are not even included in these numbers, as they are typically funded through emergency appropriations bills.
Congress and the White House need to pare down spending across the board but slashing earmarks is not the answer to a fiscally responsible government. Earmarks often provide small amounts of money to projects that would otherwise fail without them.For every ridiculous earmark there is an emergency response system in need of funding for one last test, a new naturally derived blood pressure medication that could help countless people if only it had the resources to market itself against the stranglehold of Big Pharma, and a scholarship for kids with no other way to continue an education they've literally worked their whole lives for. Far better than eliminating earmarks would be to make every bit of the appropriations open to public scrutiny. Members of Congress would be far less likely to tack unworthy items onto appropriations bills at the last moment and maybe exercise a little more caution with the budget as a whole. Calling for the elimination of earmarks amounts to little more than political theatre. It won't help the taxpayers, it could hurt communities, and it avoids tackling the real problem: the inability of the public to police the federal spending process.
Learn more about this author, Will Gorham.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.
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- Government & Policies
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