The earmark debate is a distraction of major proportions. It is also an example of hypocrisy of major proportions, as Taxpayer for Common Sense documents. You can download there data at this location.
The data demonstrate quite conclusively that earmarks are largely, though not solely, the domain of those states and of that party that keeps lecturing the rest of us about-well, about how terribly irresponsible our government is due to all those earmarks. By and large, Republican Senators lead the pack in requesting and getting earmarks. By and large the money is flowing from those states that pay the lions share of the taxes (e.g, the Northeast) to those that have made a century long habit of sucking the public teat (e.g., the South). It would be interesting to see what the per capita expense for earmarks is for those states that voted for McCain versus those that voted for Obama. Bear in mind that those states are largely the less populated ones, though each has two senators elbowing their way to the front of the lunch line.
Ryan Grim at the Huffington Post concludes:
Rural and small-state voters were the big winners on an absolute and on a per capita basis, even though it was big states and urban areas that have delivered Congress and the White House to Democrats. Of the top ten earmarking senators, only Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.; $77 million solo; $235 combined), represents a large state and only three of the top ten are blue states. In the top 20, only six blue states are represented.
I’m not sure all those conclusions are expressly supported by the Taxpayers for Common Sense data, but its reasonable to conclude that earmarks do constitute a massive shift of wealth from Blue to Red States, and from urban to rural states, and therefore, by extension, from us socialists to the hardy self reliant folk in the “heartland”. Most of the Republican Senators railing against earmarks are, in essence, demanding that we stop them before they kill again.
There’s nothing wrong in theory with earmarks, and some of them are worthwhile. In total they are an extremely small percentage of the budget. They are a talking point really, and it would be nice if Reid (who is a sinner in his own right) would call their bluff by stripping the bill of any earmark requested by any Republican complaining about them (McConnell has 36 private earmarks (total cost a little more than $51 million). By way of comparison, the entire New England Delegation has 47 (total cost about 21 million), with the Democrats in the delegation accounting for 1 of those earmarks. If you include Bernie Sanders as a Democrat, the number increases to 17.
Reid may or may not need 60 votes to pass anything in the Senate, but he could stop a lot of the Republican nonsense by doing a better job of illuminating their hypocrisy.
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