Voice For Liberty

Tag: Earmarks

  • Obama faces earmark test

    A test for President Barack Obama is coming up soon.

    When campaigning for the presidency, Obama pledged to end earmark spending. As reported earlier this year in Time Magazine: “… both Obama and Republican nominee John McCain tried to outdo each other with their pledges to rid Washington of the notorious pet projects that legislators slip into spending bills. Obama, who authored 2007 legislation to overhaul congressional ethics rules governing lobbying and earmarks, runs a real credibility risk when he makes exceptions to his own rules.”

    But did he make a pledge to end earmarks? MediaMatters says he didn’t make a specific pledge. But he certainly criticized the earmark process.

    At any rate, a bill loaded with earmarks is heading to the president for his signature. As reported in the New York Times: “The bill includes 1,720 earmarks costing $4.2 billion for lawmakers’ pet projects, according to the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense.”

    Earlier this year, Obama signed a spending bill that contained earmarks. His defenders said that it was “last year’s business.”

    Fair enough. Obama inherited certain conditions upon assuming office. But now — at least as far as this spending bill is concerned — it’s all his own doing.

    We’ll know soon how Obama really feels about earmark spending.

  • Earmarks are (not) OK

    In a Wichita Eagle letter, writer Prem N. Bajaj of Wichita makes the case that Earmarks are OK. But only by tortured reasoning, in my opinion.

    First, he states: “Earmarks finance local projects that the community is unable to support.” I ask Mr. Bajaj this question: Where, if not from community, does money for earmarks come from? If you consider just two parties — your local community and the federal government — earmarks may seem like a great thing. Free money! Who doesn’t want that? But communities across the country lobby for and get earmarks too, and they may be represented by congressmen more skilled at obtaining earmarks than ours.

    At best, earmarks might be a wash, where each community receives earmarks equal to what it sends to Washington. But even if this were the case, why have Washington involved at all? Each community could keep its own money and spend it as it sees fit, without subjecting itself to the waste and corruption inherent in the present earmark process.

    Then he writes this: “The money comes from the taxpayers, and they are the beneficiaries.” Mr. Bajaj writes as though relying on government, rather than markets and the private sector, leads to greater wealth. In fact, the opposite is true. The incentives that government faces and responds to are not the same as the private sector, where waste and inefficiency are punished. Not to mention failing to supply what consumers really want to buy.

    A few quotes from economist Thomas Sowell seem appropriate at this time:

    “This was all before politicians gave us the idea that the things we could not afford individually we could somehow afford collectively through the magic of government.”

    “If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else’s expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves.”

    “Mystical references to ‘society’ and its programs to ‘help’ may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.”

    “The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”

  • Voters Want Less Pork, Even in Their Own District

    From Voters Want Less Pork, Even in Their Own District, July 24, 2008 Wall Street Journal:

    The Club for Growth recently conducted a nationwide poll on government spending, and the results were exactly the opposite of what most politicians have been saying for years. Voters are fed up with Washington’s out-of-control spending. Politicians aren’t representing the will of the people when they bring home the bacon. They are really representing the will of their special-interest cronies. And it’s not just conservative voters who feel that way. Voters across the board have finally found something they can agree on even if their elected officials can’t: It’s time to cut the fat, even if that means fewer projects for their own districts.

  • Earmarks and pork thoroughly established

    In a letter printed in the February 22, 2008 Wichita Eagle, Sedgwick County Commission Chairman Tom Winters, along with Wichita State University President Don Beggs, praised some Kansas congressmen for being “very effective Washington advocates for south-central Kansas.” What the congressmen — Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Goddard, and Kansas Sens. Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts — did was to “roll up their sleeves and work on many issues that help improve our quality of life in the Wichita area.” Sounds like a noble cause, doesn’t it?

    What the three congressmen did was to secure federal funding for several projects deemed important to Chairman Winters and President Beggs. In other words, they brought home the pork to Wichita in the form of earmarks. This is why efforts to reform earmarks and pork barrel spending have failed and are likely to continue to fail. Evidence of this is Tom Winters, as I believe that he would describe himself as fiscally conservative, yet he praises his congressmen when they bring home the pork.

    Rep. Todd Tiahrt recently sent me a newsletter by email titled “It’s Time to End Wasteful Spending.” It told me of his goal “to find and create solutions that will benefit Kansas taxpayers.” He’s done just that, according to the letter from Winters and Beggs, and in the past too.

    In 2004 the Wichita Business Journal reported on two projects where Rep. Tiahrt brought home funding to his district. One was a computer-aided dispatch system for Sedgwick County’s 911 system. The other was a grant to the Wichita Art Museum. Neither recipient of the earmarks, the director of Sedgwick County’s Emergency Communications Department and the director of the Wichita Art Museum, thought the spending qualified as pork. Most pork recipients feel the same.

    Then there’s Tiahrt’s earmark for the BTK investigation. As reported in Human Events: “Tiahrt, according to ‘The Almanac of American Politics,’ has bragged that one of the ‘top 10 most gratifying things I’ve done’ is securing $1 million in an omnibus appropriations bill for the Wichita Police Department to investigate the ‘BTK’ killer.”

    That’s the way it usually is. The recipients of the earmarked pork barrel spending believe the need is urgent, the cause worthy, and a federal earmark is justified. It seems that everyone across the country believes this about their own pet projects.

    To Rep. Tiahrt’s credit, he has voted for earmark reform measures. But his behavior and that of our two senators, Roberts and Brownback, is to continue to bring home earmarks and pork for the good of the folks back home.

    And who can blame them, really? After all, we pay taxes to the federal government. Shouldn’t we get something back? Even Ron Paul gets earmarks for his congressional district. Should Rep. Tiahrt turn down earmarks, his political opponents would have his hide for failing to look out for the needs of his district.

    But with these attitudes, earmark reform will never succeed, and pork barrel politics will never end.

  • Rep. Todd Tiahrt and BTK

    Congressman Todd Tiahrt has secured $1 million for use by the Wichita Police Department in the omnibus appropriations bill that goes before the House of Representatives on Monday.

    The bill has already passed the Senate, Tiahrt spokesman Chuck Knapp said, and approval by the House is expected to be a formality.

    While there are safeguards in place to make sure the money is used for certain purposes, Knapp said, “we’re just not able to comment on the details of the funding.” — From “BTK ‘clues’ breed theories” in The Wichita Eagle, December 2, 2004.

    Here The Wichita Eagle reports that U.S. Representative Todd Tiahrt secured one million dollars from the federal government to help pay for costs related to the investigation of the BTK serial killer. Rep. Tiahrt was widely praised for this.

    We should remember where that money came from. It didn’t fall out of the sky. It wasn’t free. It came from the taxpayers of the entire country. I suspect that many people in Wichita thought it was good that we got the nation as a whole to pay for the BTK investigation.

    But think about what had to happen behind the scenes. Rep. Tiahrt must have lobbied for the money. Then the federal government collected tax money, only to send it back to Wichita. That, right there, is inefficient. A bureaucracy had to exist to perform that.

    Then, of course, Rep. Tiahrt and Wichita aren’t the only ones looking for a federal handout. When other cities or states receive money in this way — a special payment to one locality for a special project — we in Wichita call it pork barrel spending. That’s exactly what Rep. Tiahrt engaged in to get us the money for BTK. He should be ashamed, and we should not laud him for it.