Charging RINO, ‘The Problem with Earmarks’, 2006, http://chargingrino.blogspot.com/2006/06/problem-with-earmarks.html, "Some stats: 'The number of earmarks in the annual defense spending bill increased from 587 worth $4.2 billion in fiscal 1994 to 2,506 worth $9 billion in fiscal 2005, according to a recent Congressional Research Service study. There were 231 'plus-ups' - the Navy's term for the money Congress adds for its members' pet projects - totaling nearly $600 million just in the Office of Naval Research budget in fiscal 2005, about a quarter of the total.' [...] This is a problem. And until members of Congress take serious steps to end their addiction to earmaking, it's not a problem that's going away."

Counterpoint:

Harris-Lacewell, Melissa, ‘In Defense of Earmarks’ 2009, http://www.thenation.com/blog/defense-earmarks, "earmarks are not necessarily evil. [...] An earmark is just a way of describing a government funded project where the spending is designated for a particular group or location."

Sell, T.M., ‘A few kind words for earmarks’, 2009, http://crosscut.com/2009/02/09/politics-government/18839/A-few-kind-words-for-earmarks/, “Earmarks were in fact less than 1 percent of the federal budget in 2008. Congress could use a germaneness rule, so that amendments to bills, including earmarks, have to relate to the original bill. That would prevent some shenanigans. But even though a lot of earmarks get through Congress, it’s difficult to argue that earmarks are what has driven up the federal deficit.”

Hoyer, Steny H., ‘’Pork’ doesn’t fatten budget’, 2009, http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2009/03/opposing-view-p.html, [link not working], Earmarks [...] make up a tiny portion of the budget but have received a disproportionate share of attention.

[...] Some politicians try to cultivate an image of fiscal discipline by railing against earmarks -- and "pork" also makes a great story for the news media. But as congressional scholar Thomas Mann recently noted, earmarks do not generally increase spending but simply allow members of Congress to direct a small part of a program's funding. "Abolishing all earmarks would therefore have a trivial effect on the level of spending," Mann explained, adding that "hyperbolic attacks on earmarks are a disservice to the public, encouraging people to concentrate way too much attention and energy on a largely symbolic issue and ignore the critical decisions that we face.'

Getting our fiscal house in order is much more difficult and more essential than arguing over earmarks. We must take a tough look at the future of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and reform our defense budget to protect our security and tax dollars. Only by making tough choices on big issues will we return our nation to fiscal responsibility.

Rauch, Jonathan, ‘Earmarks Are A Model, Not A Menace’, 2009 http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/st_20090314_4955.php, "Obsessing about earmarks, indeed, has the perverse, if convenient, effect of distracting the country from its real spending problems, thus substituting indignation for discipline.

[...] These days, the problem is not so much with earmarking as with Congress's and the public's obsession with it. "It just takes too damn much time," Lilly says. "Congress is spending an inordinate amount of time on 1 percent of the budget and giving the executive branch much too free a rein on the other 99 percent."

Counterpoint:

Elander, Eugene, ‘So, what’s wrong with earmarks?’, 2009, http://www.opednews.com/articles/So-what-s-wrong-with-earm-by-Eugene-Elander-090309-812.html, "One person's earmark is another's vitally needed infrastructure project." Many call all earmarks that do not benefit them "wasteful", while accepting earmark funding for their own local needs as "necessary". "Waste" and "necessity" are in the eyes of the beholder. Because most earmarks do not benefit any given citizen, citizens often view nearly all earmarks as "wasteful".

Rauch, Jonathan, ‘Earmarks Are A Model, Not A Menace’, 2009 http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/st_20090314_4955.php "Competition for funding, combined with flexibility and local knowledge, makes earmarks 'often some of the best expenditures the federal government makes in a particular area,' Lilly says. 'I would say, on the whole, earmarks probably provide as much value-added as non-earmarked federal spending.'"

Emanuel, Rahm, ‘Don’t Get Rid of Earmarks’, 2007 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/24/opinion/24emanuel.html?_r=1&oref=slogin “In my own district, I obtained an earmark to rebuild a bridge that not only was rated as deficient but also was identified by the Department of Homeland Security as a major evacuation route in case of a terrorist attack on Chicago. Does that make me an “earmark thug” or a congressman who took care of a critical need in his district?

Other earmarks I’ve championed include money for after-school programs, computers for police patrol cars, master teacher training programs and a children’s hospital research facility. I make no apologies for these earmarks, which serve important public purposes — and might even save a life. I’m happy to defend them in the well of the House or against attacks from campaign opponents.”

Cole, Zachary, ‘Congress spending vote stirs earmarks debate’, 2009, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/04/MN8P168F1I.DTL, To Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the $7.7 billion in earmarks tucked into a $410 billion spending bill are wasteful pork. But those are fighting words to Tony Pearsall, a former police captain and city councilman in Vallejo, whose nonprofit group would get one of those earmarks.

The group, Fighting Back Partnership, which runs programs for at-risk kids in the Vallejo public schools, would benefit from a $333,000 earmark requested by Martinez Democratic Rep. George Miller.

"When you are dealing with kids, who are our future, how can you consider it pork or unreasonable spending?" Pearsall asked. [...]

Pearsall said his Vallejo nonprofit is run on a shoestring with small grants from the federal and state governments and private foundations. Without the federal help, youth programs would be cut back, he said.

"It would be devastating," he said. "Right now Vallejo is bankrupt. There are not many programs in the schools because the school district is in dire straits financially. All the city departments are in dire straits financially."

Grace, Stephanie, ‘In defense of earmarks’, 2009, http://blog.nola.com/stephaniegrace/2009/03/in_defense_of_earmarks.html, A recent analysis of the $410 billion spending bill just approved by Congress, issued by the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense, placed both Louisiana senators in the top five of earmark sponsors.

Does that mean Louisiana's voters are up in arms, or that they should be? Hardly.

The bill includes things like $8.6 million for Louisiana Coastal Area Ecosystems Restoration projects, $5.7 million for Morganza to the Gulf hurricane protection, $16.5 million for maintenance and operations of the Gulf Coast Intracoastal Waterway. Not exactly frivolous, in most local eyes.

Nor is the $6.6 million for Formosan termite research now heading New Orleans' way, even though anti-earmark purist Sen. John McCain has singled it out as an example of unjustified spending. Perhaps McCain doesn't know, or care, how much of a threat those bugs present to the area's building stock.

That's the point. Earmarks, if used properly, give power to those who do know the local landscape.

In the just-completed spending bill, Landrieu ranked third with $332 million in earmarks, which should come as no surprise, given that she's an unabashed earmark fan.

"I advocate for these and other Louisiana projects because they are important to the people and communities in my state, " Landrieu said. "There will always be a need to direct appropriations dollars based on the reality on the ground."

Emanuel, Rahm, ‘Don’t Get Rid of Earmarks’, 2007 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/24/opinion/24emanuel.html?_r=1&oref=slogin “I happen to believe that I know more about the needs of the people I represent than some bureaucrat in Washington, an ideologue in the White House, or worse, a bureaucrat with orders from a White House ideologue.”

Minge, David, ‘The Case Against Academic Earmarking’, http://www.aaas.org/spp/yearbook/2002/ch12.pdf, "unfortunate is the symbolism of earmarking. In an era of large deficits it was easier to resist such spending. We needed discipline to balance the budget. Earmarks could not be afforded. Now with the surplus, we are threatened with an opening of the floodgates. It is hard to convince constituents of the need for restraint and fair play when word of earmarks leaks out."

Los Angeles Times, ‘Earmark games in Washington’, 2009, http://articles.latimes.com/2009/mar/10/opinion/ed-earmarks10, “Earmarks, which are inserted into spending bills without the usual committee review, don't always amount to wasteful pork. It's not hard to decide whether a bridge to nowhere is a worthwhile project, but such clear examples of abuse get a great deal of attention because they're relatively rare. It's much harder to determine whether an educational program in Missouri or a museum expansion in Los Angeles is really something taxpayers should be funding. That's why blanket moratoriums aren't necessarily the best approach. It's better to open the books to scrutiny and let the public decide whether an individual earmark is wasteful or unnecessary.”

Counterargument:

Sell, T.M., ‘A few kind words for earmarks’, 2009, http://crosscut.com/2009/02/09/politics-government/18839/A-few-kind-words-for-earmarks/, “The complaining about lack of congressional oversight in the stimulus package underscores the absurdity of the post-modern America polity: We brag about our freedom, democracy, and superior form of government, and yet relatively few Americans have any faith in it or understand how it works. (And if we’re the greatest nation on earth, why do we have to keep telling everybody?)

My own students will frequently say they know nothing about government and pay little attention to it, but they know that most people in government are corrupt. How they know this is never made clear. My response often is, if so many government officials were truly on the take, they’d dress better.

Some of this automatic distrust stems from nearly 40 years of candidates campaigning against government, a gift of politics in general and the Republicans in particular. For far too long, the typical campaign rhetoric has been “government is the problem; elect me and I’ll destroy government.” The first part is yelled; the second part barely whispered.

You heard it loud and clear from the right throughout the 2008 campaign — the system is broken. Exactly how it’s broken, nobody really says, but apparently we’re going to hell on a hot rail unless we elect a bunch of people who hate government to somehow want to fix it. That’s like saying we could fix education if we hired a bunch of people who hate school.”

Reich, Robert, ‘House of Ill-Repute: It’s Time to Ban Earmarks”, 2006, http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0912-32.htm, "The conventional view in the House is Americans really don't care about lobbying reform because they take corruption for granted, and it won't especially hurt Republicans (or benefit Democrats) this fall. According to this view, Americans think Congress is rotten to the core except when it comes to their own representative, who they consider a fine, upstanding person. The phenomenon is roughly analogous to what Americans think about education -- the system is terrible except their own schools, which are fairly good."

Counterpoint: Plumber, Bradford, ‘The liberal case for pork’, 2006, http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/sugar-daddy,  If deficit hawks and goo-goo groups had their way, many perfectly good bills would never pass. In 1986, the Reagan administration was trying to shepherd a surprisingly progressive tax-reform bill through Congress. (Although the bill would have reduced the tax rate on the top income bracket, it also raised corporate taxes by $120 billion over five years and simplified the tax code by closing about $300 billion worth of corporate loopholes. More importantly, the bill effectively eliminated federal income taxes for those under the poverty line.) At the time, liberals cheered, while right-wingers in the Reagan administration were furious. William Niskanen, the president's acting chief economic adviser, reportedly said of the bill, "Walter Mondale would have been proud."

The problem was that the reform bill faced an uphill battle through the Senate. A multitude of businesses and special interests risked losing their much-cherished tax breaks, and they lobbied hard against several provisions in the bill. The only way to ensure that the bill survived was to grease it up with pork. A large number of temporary tax preferences--known as "transition rules"--were added to the bill, at the behest of individual Senators, for over 174 beneficiaries, including a variety of cities and municipal facilities. Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole worked to get his party behind the reform, and for his efforts received a tax preference for the redevelopment in his home state of Kansas. Even Ohioan Howard Metzenbaum, a longstanding opponent of narrowly-tailored corporate tax breaks, secured exemptions for convention centers in his home state.

As Alan Murray and Jeffrey Birnbaum reported in Showdown at Gucci Gulch, the definitive account of the 1986 tax reform, "Every time [Senate Finance Committee Chairman Bob] Packwood ventured onto the Senate floor, his colleagues stuffed pieces of paper into his jacket pocket, with additional requests for transition rules." It was a feeding frenzy. It was obscene. But it also worked: "The transition rules were a necessary evil; they would help assure passage of the bill." And since the exemptions cost little in the context of the larger bill, it was well worth the price.

Less than a decade later, Bill Clinton discovered the virtues of pork while trying to pass his deficit-reduction package in 1993. Since Republicans flatly refused to support the president's budget, Clinton had to strong-arm several holdout Democrats into supporting the bill and its unpalatable tax hikes. Legislative bribery did the trick. Arizona Senator Dennis DeConcini stopped opposing the budget after he was promised a cut on Social Security taxes, benefiting seniors (a key constituency in his state). Dianne Feinstein wavered on the bill until she received R&D subsidies for California companies. The budget ended up squeaking through the Senate on Vice President Al Gore's tie-breaking vote and paved the way for balanced budgets late in the decade--a previously unthinkable task which some economists credit with helping to spur the economic boom in the '90s. Pork made it all possible.

The point is this: Any big-government program on the progressive wish list will likely prove even more difficult to pass than the 1986 tax reform or 1993 budget. Single-payer health care? Card check for unions? Reductions in carbon emissions? It won't get done without an orgy of earmarks to entice the inevitable skeptics in Congress. That won't be pretty, but if the price of, say, universal insurance is a bit of borderline corruption here and there, it's a tradeoff worth making. And, while it's true that conservatives can use earmarks to pass their own massive spending programs--the prescription-drug benefit comes to mind--in the long run, institutional mechanisms that enable activist government will favor liberals.

Minge, David, ‘The Case Against Academic Earmarking’, http://www.aaas.org/spp/yearbook/2002/ch12.pdf, "Within the academic community, the earmarking process could become corrosive. At its logical extreme, faculty would be rewarded more for their role in politics than for developing sound research proposals. Assistant professors would be encouraged to put up lawn signs and distribute campaign literature to enhance their political influence with Members of Congress. Given the importance of fundraising, department heads, deans, and university presidents would be drawn into raising money for congressional races as a way of gaining the ultimate influence. We certainly do not want to go down that road."