When it comes to earmarks, I agree with Mark Schmidt: they are a phantom problem. While they are often blamed for excess spending in D.C., the truth is that they are in no way excess spending:
As policy, I'm as indifferent to the issue of earmarks as Tom Mann. They're inconsequential. Not only do they represent less than one percent of the federal budget, eliminating them wouldn't even reduce federal spending by even that tiny amount, or any amount at all, since earmarks by definition simply tag the spending in an already established pot of money, such as the Community Development Block Grant. The only question is whether decisions about funding individual projects should be made by Congress -- through earmarks -- or by a supposedly apolitical administrative process. Except for the tremendous inequities between states with clout on the Appropriations Committees and those without, Graham's argument that politicians have a legitimate role in deciding which large projects in their states should be priorities makes sense.
Like most of the problems Broder-esque cultists cite as dragging down the federal government (too partisan! too ideological! Social Security crisis!) earmarks are not actually a major, or even really a minor, problem facing the government. They don't add any spending whatsoever, as they are instead providing specific direction to money that has already been appropriated. The issue here, if any, is not financial but instead about transparency and competitive bidding. Like the expenditure of all federal money, it is a good idea to make sure that we know which lawmaker pushed it, that there has been a chance to debate it in public, and that any company which benefits from it had to go through a competitive bidding process. Those are guarantees we need not only when it comes to earmarks, but with all federal spending.
In light of this, the earmark reforms announced today by President Obama and Congressional Democrats, which are detailed in the extended entry, are perfectly adequate. This is, at best, a one-speech issue, and simply not deserving of the attention it receives given the severity of other, actual problems we face.
Obama outlined the following principles for an earmark process:
Members' earmark requests should posted on their Web sites;
There should be public hearings on earmark requests "where members will have to justify their expense to the taxpayer;"; and
Any earmark for a for-profit company would have to be competitively bid.
"If my administration evaluates an earmark and determines that it has no legitimate public purpose, we will seek to eliminate it, and we will work with Congress to do so," he said.
The House and Senate Appropriations panels already announced earlier this year that members would have to post requests on their Web sites. They also announced a plan to limit the growth of earmarks by keeping the amount of funding devoted to the projects to less than 1 percent of overall discretionary spending.
Now, these reforms probably won't stop the outcry over this phantom problem in the media, but that isn't a surprise since we don't have a sane, rational political discourse.
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