Earmarking Artificial Growth

Accuracy in Academia ^ | December 14, 2010 | Malcolm A. Kline

[Academiadotorg]

In an age of limits, colleges and universities are expanding, with the aid of taxpayers with increasingly limited resources. “Colleges stand to lose billions of dollars for research, facilities, and other purposes if Congressional leaders hold firm in their pledge to ban earmarks, the spending that individual members direct to their home states and favorite projects outside of the competitive processes,” Kevin Kiley reported in the December 17, 2010 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. “Some of the biggest losers would be colleges in states whose lawmakers in Washington hold top positions on appropriations committees, and which have traditionally received substantial earmarks.”

“In spending bills for the 2010 fiscal year, colleges in Texas, Mississippi, and California received the most Congressionally directed money for academic projects, according to an analysis of data by Taxpayers for Common Senses, a nonprofit watchdog group.” Although the earmarks account for “about one-half of 1 percent of all appropriations in 2010,” according to Kiley, they finance spending that is beyond the wildest dreams of most businesses.

“Earmarks brought about $2.25 billion to colleges and universities in 2008, the most recent year for which The Chronicle has conducted a comprehensive analysis,” Kiley wrote. “Those earmarks financed about 2,300 projects, including campus buildings, research projects, and research centers.”

You can get an idea of how much individual universities can rake in from this process by looking at the coffers of Ole Miss. “The Chronicle’s 2008 analysis of higher education earmarks found that Mississippi State University and the University of Mississippi topped the list of institutions receiving earmarks that year, receiving $40 million and $37.5-million, respectively,” Kiley recounted.

[Dick Bachert]

So what’s new??

History teaches that an “artificial” money creates an equally “artificial” world where the price for some item...even our most popular welfare “program”...can be deferred to future generations (our multi-trillion national debt) or “paid” with a “money” created out of thin air which robs the value from the money we might be unfortunate enough to have in our pockets at that moment (inflation).

And one thing you must remember about inflation is that it is not an “equal opportunity” destroyer: Those first in line to get their hands on the new money rolling off the presses (the modern friends of paper money) have a chance to spend it before it loses its value. The little people (that’s us, folks!) farthest down the line are the ones who feel the fullest effects of this destructive process.

That’s because it was planned that way.