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Evaluating Earmarks
listen:
  They’re easy to criticize, these last minute spending items slipped into bills – in fact, President Bush has demanded Congress cut them in half! But many projects benefit from earmarks, from the University of New Hampshire to the White Mountain National Forest. We’ll look at the role this money plays and whether earmarks should be erased or embraced. Guests
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The guests have missed the point entirely. Collecting money from all the states, sending it to Washington, and redistributing it to the states is an inefficient system that naturally leads to corruption. The Federal government should reduce taxes and leave the money at home, so that states can make their own decisions as to what their priorities are.
Bill Moyers did a show on Earmarks within the last month or so, featuring work done by a great reporter from the Seattle Times. You can go to their web site and see the earmarks for every memeber of Congress, as well as the candidate donations for the last 7 or 8 years from the Companies that received the earmarks! Great stuff! Check out:
http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/favorfactory/
You can also go to PBS.org and click on Bill Moyers and then put in "earmarks" on his home page search, and this and other sites will come up.
If you spend any time lookng at the earmarks by Gregg and Sununu, what jumps out is that a LOT of them have to do with military projects and companies that either are trying, can't, or are selling a particular project to the Military.
I recently read a number that says we spend about 1 TRILLION dollars yearly on our Defense Budget! You won't see that total number anywhere, but the numbers you "don't see" include these earmarks, CIA budgets, and many other "off line" or "hidden" (to us) expenditures.
Senator Gregg, for example,had almost 40 million dollars in 2007 for Defense Earmarks, and Senator Sununu had over $50 million dollars. This is all part of over 11 billion dollars in "earmarks" total from all of our "special elected officials" from all 50 states.
Even if the earmarks are only "small" items contained within the defense bill, some of these items are NOT NEEDED, NOT WANTED, or are terrible wastes of money. But not to worry. They provide local jobs and donations for our congressional officials. But they also "take away" money for needed items!
But this issue is only a warm up for the REAL ISSUE we need to find a way to enact, and that is TERM LIMITS.
Without term limits, we can't save us from ourselves.
The fact that they could not agree on some earmark curbs for just ONE YEAR as a trial basis tells us how bad things are down there. And yes, OUR GUYS ARE PART OF THE PROBELM TOO!
The electorate has never been more empowered to know in real time what Congress is doing. We have C -Span, email, NPR, the web, etc. etc. But we really don't have any more power than John Adams in the 1700's did with his votes every 2 or 6 years for our special "elected Congressional Class."
Sounds to me like Laura needs a show on how WE THE PEOPLE can hold our elected officials "feet to the fire" in the 21st Century.
Let us hear some discussion about TERM LIMITS as well.