by Will Gorham

Created on: December 11, 2008

Arguing for a simple, across the board elimination of federal earmarks has recently trumped mom and apple pie as the easiest americanpoliticaltrick 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

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