Earmarks

I try to add something of substance instead of just linking to another blogger or writer and saying "me too!" In this case though I think Kevin Drum addresses the issue of earmarks smartly and I have nothing to add. Please give it a read.

Now, there's not much question that earmarking got wildly out of hand in the waning days of the last Republican congress. You can even make a case for eliminating earmarking entirely and leaving detailed budgeting decisions entirely up to the federal bureaucracy. But that's all that eliminating earmarks would do: move the spending decisions into other hands. It wouldn't actually reduce spending by a penny.

Personally, I've never really seen the harm in allowing members of Congress to have a certain level of influence over allocating federal funds in their states and districts. They're elected by the people, after all, and part of the whole democracy thing is that they're supposed to be the ones who have the best sense of what their constituents would like to see their tax dollars spent on. So why not allow them some control? If you keep it both transparent and modest, there's nothing really all that wrong with it.

Still, if McCain prefers the bureaucracy to have 100% control over budget allocations, that's fine. But he needs to acknowledge that the true size of all federal earmarks is small (about $18 billion or so) and that earmarks are merely a way of directing spending, not increasing it. Eliminating them won't save any money, it will just change where the money goes.

That's not very impressive as a demogogic stump speech, but it has the virtue of being honest. And Mr. Straight Talk shouldn't have a problem with that, should he?