Earmarks have become the new four-letter word, thanks largely to John McCain. But exactly what are "earmarks?" They are not, as some politicians and regular people would have you believe, black holes where taxpayer money goes to die. In fact, earmarks are the way Congressmen and women get money to send to their districts. Some earmarks are stupid, most are not. Most are useful expenditures of taxpayer funds that, in general, make life better, not just for those home districts, but for every American.
It's time we stopped treating earmarks as a dirty word.
John McCain made earmarks an issue in the presidential campaign. One in particular that I remember was his calling out of an earmark for a "$3 million projector for Illinois." McCain made it sound like Illinois was asking for a slide show projector, when, in fact, it was asking for a projector to replace an aging machine in the country's oldest planetarium, the Adler Planetarium.
Sarah Palin, of course, was famous for denying her request for millions of dollars for a road leading to the "bridge to nowhere."
Republicans continue to voice opposition to earmarks, all the while slipping them into spending bills. According to the Thomas Jefferson Street Blog:
Republican Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi tops the list, with $470 million in earmarks for himself and his colleagues. Next up is Cochran's seatmate—Republican Roger Wicker, hitting the scales at $390 million. Two Democrats—Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Tom Harkin of Iowa—come in at Nos. 3 and 4, before Republican David Vitter of Louisiana rounds out the top five. Of the top 10, six are Republicans.
But are earmarks wasteful? Well, yeah, some are. But in general, earmarks are less than 1 percent of a $3 trillion budget.
Are there bad earmarks? No doubt. The Wooden Arrow thing, the Charles Rangle Institute, the Boytden, Va., walking tour. Maybe. I don't know enough about them to have an opinion. The rest on this list may be legit.
But just because something sounds stupid doesn't mean it is. What sounds dumb to someone living in Georgia may be a matter of life and death to someone living in Utah. And those earmarks be that difference.
I think it is time we all stopped thinking of earmarks as necessarily evil things. Just because they don't make sense to you doesn't mean they aren't important to someone.