Are you nuts? The only thing they do with earmarks is barter and bribe.....then when it gets passed on it goes to the others who do likewise.
Can you point to a time in the countries history when this was not the way tax dollars were distributed? You can’t because this is how it is set up in the Constitution. If you have an issue with corruption involving where the money goes, that is different matter entirely. The who and how is quite clearly defined.
BTW, this is how much we will save by eliminating these evil “earmarks”.
“Eliminating 100 Percent of Earmarks Cuts Federal Spending Less Than 0.5 Percent”
If you haven’t got the memo yet, entitlement spending is what is sinking the country.
In my state, for example, U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has a record of fighting earmarks on the federal level and that opposition dates back to similar fights she had at the state level when she held office in Missouri state government. On the other hand, former U.S. Rep. Ike Skelton, the former chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, used earmarks regularly for Fort Leonard Wood and Whiteman Air Force Base and the Missouri National Guard.
Both are Democrats. That should point out that this isn't a clearcut issue of Democrats versus Republicans; as Santorum’s votes indicate, quite a few Republicans supported earmarks too before they became politically unpopular.
It all boils down to two things:
1. Whether you prefer to have spending decisions made by explicitly political votes of elected officials or have them made by supposedly nonpolitical decisions of unelected staff members of federal agencies, and
2. Regardless of whether earmarking is okay in principle, whether the actual practice of earmark abuse had gotten so bad that moderate measures wouldn't suffice to fix the problem and earmarking had to be killed entirely with a blunt sledgehammer rather than a surgical scalpel.
The standard conservative Republican position today is sledgehammers are necessary. I don't object to that. Things are so bad today with the federal budget that drastic steps are necessary, and a ban on earmarks sends a strong signal that lawmaker's special projects won't be exempt from cuts by being protected through the earmark process.
However, we can't blame Santorum for earmarking when most other people on **BOTH** sides of the aisle considered that to be a significant part of their jobs as elected officials, and long-term, I'm not sure conservative Republicans have thought through the consequences of having unelected bureaucrats rather than elected officials making these decisions.
Bottom line: earmarking has gotten a bad reputation. We can't deny that reputation has been well-earned by bad behavior of elected officials.
Long-term, however, I'm worried that the cure will be worse than the disease.