Save Us From Earmarks!

To hear John McCain tell it, earmarks are the biggest problem facing our dismal ecomony. He and Sarah Palin have been hammering away at earmarks to show everyone how their magical reforms will re-make Washington, and solve a budget crisis brought on by 8 years of guns and butter from George W. Bush's Republican party.

So, a quick question before we go any further.




If you said, "Less than 1%" give yourself a cookie.

That's right. The item at the top of McCain's agenda, the thing that's going to herald a new era of reform, and get us back on track, isn't really all that.

What's really rich, however, (besides McCain himself, that is) is the Palin/McCain assertion that the Alaska governor ever saw an earmark that she didn't like. "Thanks, but no thanks," is what she said she told Ted Stevens and Don Young regarding the "Bridge to Nowhere." But the record goes so directly against what they're telling people in their stump speech that even The Wall Street Journal saw fit to call the dynamic duo on their outright distortions:

Gov. Palin, who John McCain named as his running mate less than two weeks ago, quickly adopted a stump line bragging about her opposition to the pork-barren project Sen. McCain routinely decries.

But Gov. Palin's claim comes with a serious caveat. She endorsed the multi-million dollar project during her gubernatorial race in 2006. And while she did take part in stopping the project after it became a national scandal, she did not return the federal money. She just allocated it elsewhere.

Not exactly, "Thanks, but no thanks." And the woman who has now supposedly taken up the fight against those dreaded earmarks was herself one of the worst offenders according to none other than John McCain himself. From The LA Times:

In 2001, McCain's list of spending that had been approved without the normal budget scrutiny included a $500,000 earmark for a public transportation project in Wasilla. The Arizona Senator targeted $1 million in a 2002 spending bill for an emergency communications center in town--one that local law enforcement has said is redundant and creates confusion.

McCain also criticized $450,000 set aside for an agricultural processing facility in Wasilla that was requested during Palin's tenure as mayor and cleared Congress soon after she left office in 2002.

While there is no doubt that some earmarks do include wasteful, inefficient spending, the bulk of these requests go for services and infrastructure that make a difference in people's lives. The Union Leader had a good look at earmarks-- including the good, the bad and the ugly. And you can have a look at all the proposed earmarks for the 2009 Budget here. The larger point is that if we did away with them entirely A) we'd have to find a new way to funnel money back to our local communities, and B) we wouldn't come close to solving our budget woes. Lastly, the claim that Palin, who once ran indicted Senator Ted Stevens' 527, is an enemy of earmarks is patently false, as is illustrated in this handy video compiled by TPM: