oreo
Gold Member
- Thread starter
- #21
People love their earmarks, hate other people's. The whole thing is a canard for brainwashed dupes. There have always been earmarks, and there always will be. Another name for them is federal projects- they should be good projects, is all. This is pure pub electioneering, MORE paralysis.The short version: good for Republicans, they seem to have aligned their earmark requests with their rhetoric.
The long version:
I have a few concerns with their methodology:
-- While the group is nominally nonpartisan, given how clearly their philosophy aligns with one party over the other, I'm skeptical that they are genuinely neutral.
-- These are earmark requests. While they do say something about ideology, the number that is of more interest is the amount of earmarked dollars that actually get spent.
-- The Republicans seem to have interpreted their mandate as cutting spending over the "bringing home the bacon" to their districts. While plausible, that turns decades of political theory on its head. I'm curious how this will work for them in their elections.
-- Earmarks are not necessarily bad, and in any case account for only a small fraction of government spending.
Correct, well said on both counts.
The Federal Government has continually used earmarks for extortion and bribery--in their buy your VOTE policy.
They shelve earmark requests--and if a bill comes up where they need votes--they're sure to get a vote from a politician--who may be against a bill--but will vote for it anyway--because they have added in his/her earmark.
If a state really wants something that bad--the constituents of that state can figure how to come up with the money.
What may be good for a politicians reelection--can be very BAD for the citizens of this country. And we just witnessed that with Obamacare--where VOTES were bought off with earmarks.
Obamacare would have never passed without the use of bribery.
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