Joe Pags on Earmarks

[TastyWheat]

Did anyone just hear me on Joe Pags (about 20 minutes ago)? He was praising Lamar Smith for his moratorium on earmarks but I told Joe what's up. Not once did Joe correct me when I said that a moratorium on earmarks won't save any money.

[TastyWheat]

And for those of you that don't know everything about earmarks (and most Americans don't), earmarks are typically "carved out" of appropriations bills. So if $1 billion is to be spent on AIDS research a Congressman can request that $10 million go to a facility in his district. So it sounds bad that Congressmen are able to "bring home the bacon" like this, but if it weren't for earmarks there would be almost no transparency. The executive branch would then decide how every dollar is spent and we'd pretty much have no idea where it goes.

Some earmarks are added to bills (causing more money to be spent) but it's not the norm, so subtracting those we'd probably save less than $5 billion per year.