Comment: Earmarks? Really?

This is old news. If that's the best thing these guys can come up with then they are really fishing.

Earmarks = simple. They do 2 things:

1) give tax dollars back to the district that paid them

2) introduce transparency in congressional spending

Basically, there's a portion of the budget that gets set aside for every congressional district. If the congressman/woman for a district doesn't ask for the funds via earmarks then the district loses the money and it's given to the Executive Branch to spend. The earmark makes public WHERE the money is going (Congress actually has a responsibility to earmark bills so the public knows what they're doing with our tax dollars).

Again, if congressional representatives fail to ask for the money on behalf of their constituents then the money gets delivered in a lump payment to the executive branch to be spent with no transparency of any kind and there's no guarantee that the allocation made by executive agencies will be better than the allocation made by Congress (not to mention that Presidents and executive officials can use the money to reward friends/punish enemies).

Everyone gets all up in arms about the earmark issue because the confuse it with "pork barrel" spending (no, they are NOT one and the same). The fact is that directing money to particular purposes is a core constitutional function of Congress and earmarks are a way for a representative to GET BACK the tax dollars that his/her district paid.

Nobody objects to paying taxes if the taxes gets spent on things that benefit their own community right? Well, that's what Paul is doing by using earmarks. An earmark is NOT padding the bill. It does not introduce additional spending. Likewise, removing earmarks does not reduce spending. The spending has already been determined. FYI - congress directed projects via earmarks are less than 2% of the Federal budget. I mean, talk about a drop in the bucket. Jeez.

Paul always votes against the spending bills, but, in the absence of any real reform, he uses the earmarks to bring the money back to the people the gov't took it from in the first place.

Novel idea huh?

There's a lot more to be said about the topic, but I'm not gonna type it all here..check out the discussion on the Ron Paul fan site from 2008. Great ammo in the comments.

http://www.ronpaul.com/on-the-issues/earmark-reform/

Just remember that as long as the government takes from the voters in Paul's district, he has an obligation to get it back to them if he can.