TodayEarmarks not the real issue
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Editorial
Article RatingAnybody remember earmarks?
That’s what the Associated Press wanted to know in a story The Sentinel published on Friday. It was the buzzword du jour for many weeks earlier this year, and now you hardly hear anything about the concept of House and Senate members putting their names on federal grants and getting them written into appropriations bills.
At the time, one would have thought that this business of earmarking federal dollars for hometown interests was the whole reason for the ever-expanding federal deficit, which just jumped up another notch this year in the face of rising prices and a slowing economy.
In reality, the cost of all earmarks in a single year was around $64 billion in 2005, or about five months’ worth of our current war-making commitments in the Middle East, part of a budget that’s moving toward $2 trillion a year.
We don’t mean to minimize 11 figures’ worth of federal spending; as the late Sen. Everett Dirksen famously said, in jest, of course, “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”
After all, abuse of the privilege is far from unheard of. The mascot for the earmark crisis was, of course, the famous “Bridge to Nowhere,” an earmark for a bridge connecting a small island with Alaska’s mainland. Population of the island: about 50. Price of the project: a quarter-billion dollars.
The project eventually was cancelled, but the story, like those of past Pentagon procurements like $640 toilet seats and $1,000 hammers, refuses to die. And rightly so, as there’s nothing in current practice to keep these sort of abuses from cropping up again.
Still, the vast majority of earmarks tend to be worthwhile expenditures, more so if they’re earmarked for your neighborhood. The AP story notes that certain Republican lawmakers loudly proclaimed their undying enmity against earmarks months ago, using the issue as a cudgel against Democratic leadership.
Later, the very same legislators stepped up to the microphone to claim credit for procuring millions in federal appropriations for their states or congressional districts.
To sum up the argument, my earmarks are principled and worthwhile, it’s the other guy’s earmarks that are profligate and unwarranted.
This is a bipartisan sport, of course. When Republican lawmakers were tied to the Bridge to Nowhere, it was Democrats, then the minority party, who used the story to push their argument regarding a complacent, wasteful, out-of-control Congress.
As long as we have elections, we will have representatives and senators claiming credit for all sorts of federal largess directed to their districts. Doing away with earmarks entirely won’t end that practice, since it’s estimated that some 95 cents of every federal dollar goes back to the local level one way or another, whether as contracts to American companies or as direct aid to states and cities.
And there will always be a lawmaker and a camera standing ready when those checks arrive. When you total up all of those photo opportunities and line them up next to the list of earmarks, we’d bet the grants no one wants to claim as their own probably wouldn’t buy much more than a round of designer coffees at Starbucks.
So we should probably be less concerned about the earmarking process in general and more concerned about whether another Bridge to Nowhere has been written into next year’s appropriations bill. We don’t doubt there will be one, and we’d prefer to save up our outrage until it appears.
