Samuel

I’m trying to get earmarks straight.

These, in case you’ve been living in a cave, are a legislative tool that lawmakers use to direct funds to particular projects. So, while a bill may grant 1.5 billion dollars in general to crime prevention efforts, an earmark could direct $50,000 of this specifically to gang prevention in Charlotte, NC. Conservatives and liberals alike latched onto earmarks during the campaign as a way to talk about wasteful, pork barrel spending. The phrase Pork Barrel, by the way, is political shorthand for spending projects that Members of Congress sponsor in their home districts in order to curry favor with the voting folks back home.

So lets talk about earmarks, because I really want to understand what the big deal is. I’m not for wasteful government spending, but I think it’s wise for Congress to have some means of directing the funds it appropriates toward specific, worthwhile projects. So how about $50,000 for gang prevention in Charlotte? I use this example because it’s an actual earmark in the current spending bill that has become kind of an issue. I know this because since the spending bill that made its way out of the Senate today was introduced, @SenJohnMcCain has been posting supposedly wasteful earmarks to Twitter and this was one that he posted. So what I want to know is, in what way is this earmark wasteful?

Here is a story about gangs in Charlotte. It seems that they are a real issue there. I truly don’t understand how $50,000 out of a $410 billion dollar spending bill poses a major problem or constitutes any kind of problem at all. After all, what good is the power to appropriate funds if we can’t appropriate them for worthwhile projects.

But that’s one earmark picked out of the many, many that Senator McCain has twittered lately. Let’s pick another. Yesterday’s #1 wasteful earmark was $935,000 for Pasteurization of Shell Eggs. This seems pretty ridiculous, like a huge, insane expenditure of public funds. Who would want to pasteurize egg shells? As it turns out, I didn’t know.

So I did some googling, and here’s what I found;

Why pasteurize a shell egg? Because according to the Center of Disease Control, Salmonella is the #1 cause of food poisoning in the U.S.* (1.4 Million reported cases of illness and hundred of deaths). In fact, as many as 100 Million eggs may be contaminated each year. Salmonella is especially harmful to children, the elderly, and people with weakened immune systems.

Sysco Imperial Pasteurized eggs now virtually eliminate that risk.

Okay, so I’m generally no fan of pasteurization for its own sake, and if I was giving advice on how to get the freshest, healthiest eggs, I would advise you to get your own chickens. But if you ask me, developing and implementing a method to ensure consumer safety from salmonella is a reasonable expenditure of public funds.

Mind you, while I picked these examples out, I picked them from from Senator John McCain’s twitters – they were examples he was giving of wasteful spending.

In Bobby Jindall’s recent (flop of a) response to Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress, he raised a few hundred thousand for research into predicting volcanic erruptions as an example of wasteful government spending. This at a time when there are some volcanoes in Alaska threatening to erupt, and when Mount Saint Helens just a few years ago was menacingly belching smoke and ash and no one was sure whether or not to expect a second major event.

If these are the worst examples of government waste that we can come up with, I’d say the government is doing a pretty good job of not spending money wastefully.

So what I come to in terms of earmarks is that they are a red herring. By no means do I believe that there are no wasteful, shameful earmarks, nor is do I believe that wasteful government spending is anything other than a BIG problem. But what I’m growing more and more certain of as I look into some of these claims of wasteful spending is that we need to be examining government spending project by project to determine whether or not it is efficient, whether it is worthwhile, and whether it produces the desired results.

I vote that we start with defense projects.

In the end, earmarks are a tool. Sometimes they are used for good, and other times for ill. There should be more transparency in the earmarking process, and more ownership. But eliminating the tool entirely will rob the Congress of it’s constitutional authority to direct government spending where it is needed most, and to specific, worthwhile projects.