More Earmarks – Less Government
In his latest column Ron Paul explains how earmarks increase transparency by assigning funds (that would otherwise be spent by secretive bureaucrats) to a specific and fully accountable purpose. — tmartin
Download the column as an MP3 file here (3:33 minutes).
Earmarks Don’t Add Up
by Ron Paul
Earmarks seem to be the hot topic this week, and as a fiscal conservative I am dismayed so many people deliberately distort the earmarking process and grandstand to make political points. It is an easy thing to do with earmarks. It takes a little more time and patience to grasp the reality of what earmarks really are.
To be sure, if earmarks were the driving force behind explosive government spending as some have been led to believe, that would be a good reason for all the fuss. The misconception seems to be that members of Congress put together a bunch of requests for project funding, add them all together and come up with a budget. The truth is, it is not done that way. The total level of spending is determined by the Congressional leadership and the appropriators before any Member has a chance to offer any amendments. Members’ requests are simply recommendations to allocate parts of that spending for certain items in that members’ district or state. If funds are not designated, they revert to non-designated spending controlled by bureaucrats in the executive branch. In other words, when a designation request makes it into the budget, it subtracts funds out of what is available to the executive branch and bureaucrats in various departments, and targets it for projects that the people and their representatives request in their districts. If a congressman does not submit funding requests for his district the money is simply spent elsewhere. To eliminate all earmarks would be to further consolidate power in the already dominant executive branch and not save a penny.
Furthermore, designating how money is spent provides a level of transparency and accountability over taxpayer dollars that we don’t have with general funds. I argue that all spending should be decided by Congress so that we at least know where the money goes. This has been a major problem with TARP funding. The public and Congress are now trying to find out where all that money went.
The real issue is that the overall budget is too big, by far, which is why I always vote against it. But attacking the 1% that was earmarked solves nothing. The whole issue is a distraction from the real problems we face, which are that the Federal Government will absorb over 1/3 of our country’s GDP this year and taxpayers are forced to fork over more than half their income to fund government at all levels. On top of that, the national debt is $11 trillion, which is $36,000 per citizen. The recent increases in bailouts, government spending and money creation is going to hobble our economy for decades. We must curb the government’s appetite severely if this country is ever to thrive again. The noise over “earmarks” is a red herring and a distraction from the real issue of uncommitted spending.
It is time to attack the entirety of government spending. We especially need a full account of the activities of the Federal Reserve that spends and creates trillions of dollars with no meaningful oversight. This is a huge problem that needs immediate attention.
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This explanation falls flat on its face. Ron Paul is a complete fraud and the pork king of the Republican party. He is not a fiscal conservative and he should stop claiming to be one. I’ve heard him try to explain this away three times, and it gets less convincing each time.
If you still think Ron Paul is the last honest man in Washington, you are sadly mistaken.
The Ron Paul philosophy: no one should be sucking at the teet of government, but if it has to be so, Ron Paul will fight to be the first with his mouth on the fat sow’s teet.
The only thing transparent here is Ron Paul’s scam. “But I voted against my own earmarks!” is not an excuse. He must take us for fools.
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Dfens replies:
March 17th, 2009 at 11:05 pm
Read the Constitution instead of the Republican talking points for a change.
“No money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law”
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Ben replies:
March 18th, 2009 at 1:16 am
The whole premise is to get the monies that I sent to Washington back to MY home district. I would much rather have my Congressman submit ALL requests for Federal funding (i.e., EARMARK) made by my fellow citizens of TX’s 3rd District than to refuse to send them onto Washington for consideration by the respective appropriations committee.
If there is $100M being appropriatd for an Agency’s budget, I want to make sure, I–by way of my Congressman–have every opportunity to have those tax dollars come back to me; that is done through an Earmark. There’s nothing wasteful about that.
What is wasteful is to leave the $100M UNearmarked and rely on the benevolence of the Administration! Should I cross my fingers that somehow hope the money will be used to help me, ala TARP? If you think that, you are fooling yourself.
The funds will either be used by an Agency to run their programs, we already know Government Agencies are NOT efficient at doing that. Or they will be snapped up by another district for improvements elsewhere. I just received and email from Senator Barbra Boxer bragging about $1.17M in Federal funding that she secured for use the in East Bay communities of California. I wonder how much of that is actually Texas dollars.
Moreover, you or your Congressman do not get to vote against SPECIFIC earmarks, rather only against versions of a budget that includes the earmarks. So YES you want to submit EARMARKS until they come out your ears–if your Congressman is doing a good job they will–and at the same time vote against them by voting against the ever growing budgets.
Again
1. YES you do want EARMARKS to be passed on to Washington. They are a means for you to direct spending back to your home district–via your Congressman. After all, these are your tax dollars and by having them as part of a budget you know UPFRONT where the money will be spent. Otherwise you are betting that President and his appointed agency heads will know how to spend it wisely. You can then read about how they blew the money on the GAO EOY reports when it is too late.
2. If you want to save then VOTE against the Agencies budgets, not earmarks.
3. Perhaps if you have a beef about specific earmarks then get mad at the legislators in the respective Appropriations Committees. They’re the ones who decide whose earmark gets funded, such as the infamous “Bridge to nowhere”.
BTW the quote you selected only supports Ron Paul’s position since it is Congress the “Law” Making Branch that he argues should be making budget decisions.
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The bulk of government waste is not in the Fed, although clearly the Fed is wasteful, but most of government waste is in contracts. There is no accountability in government contracting because the government pays for process and not for results. If you needed to have your house remodeled would you reimburse his expenses and pay the contractor a profit on every day he spent working on your house? No, of course you wouldn’t! You’re not stupid, right? You can see the problem with doing that. Those terms would guarantee that the contractor would try to drag out the work as long as possible to maximize his profit. The more days he spends, the more profit he makes.
If that doesn’t make sense for you to do, why does it make sense for the federal government to do that very thing? Why do we put up with the government paying companies a profit on every day they spend developing a new weapon? Is it because we like to pay many times more than we need to for everything? If you pay a profit for process, you get lots of process. If you pay for results, you get results. We need to change the way the federal government does business. They need to stop paying more to contractors who through learned incompetence drag projects out years longer than they should, and start paying more to contractors that get their projects done on time and on budget and provide a good product. That’s not so hard to figure out, is it?
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I have a tale of two airplane programs for you. Both programs were run at the same plant by many of the same people. Both programs made the same kind of modifications to cargo aircraft used by the US Air Force. The first one, the C-130J program, was funded by the contractor themselves. The development cost for new avionics, engines, and other misc. upgrades was $1 billion. The next program was a similar upgrade to the C-5M. This time the Air Force was picking up the tab. The development cost doubled to $2 Billion for the same work by the same people. Now this is development cost I’m talking about, so the fact that the C-5 is a bigger airplane is irrelevant because we are talking about the engineering effort in development, taking the greater materials and processing cost of the bigger airplane out of the equation.
Twice as much for the same work, the only independent variable being who’s paying. If it’s the company paying for the work it costs half as much, and takes half as long as well. Ok, gee, this is a hard decision to make. Which way should we go in the future? Hmm, I’m not sure. Oh, I know, instead of fixing what’s wrong, let’s stop publishing development cost numbers so no one can see how those are skyrocketing. Let’s keep this all hushed up so no one will see how inflated development costs really are. That way we can continue to suck the taxpayer dry while government contractors make record profits providing services and supplies that are far over budget and over schedule, and of consistenly poor quality. Apparently this is a solution the US taxpayer can live with because this is the one you got.
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What ever happened to our original Constitutional way of raising money through direct taxes? I believe that the way they used to do this was through the states. For instance, Congress comes up with a budget, then it is voted on, and each state is billed for the expense by enumeration. If the state you live in got a bill for the money Congress is spending, believe me, they are going to check and see that the money is coming back to their own state by enumeration (population). For instance, the tax on fishing equipment and boat fuel under the Magnusen Stevens Act,that money is collected at the federal level and then redistributed to each state according to it’s totla collection with government expenses being subtracted. In the old days, the tax was passed, the state kept it’s expenses and paid over the rest to the Fed. I don’t know what they do now, but does anyone know when this changed?
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Or the other Constitutional way of raising taxes which was tariffs!
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I think sen.Ron Paul is one of the few politician in the US, and may be in the world (I am not American) that says things very close to the truth/reality; he is always been consistent with what he thinks, always respectuful of the Constitution. He is one of the few politicians that has enough courage to tell us how things really are, especially about economic issues.
thanks Sen. Paul
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It’s just like the Republicrats to start all this chest beating about less than 1% of the budget. They don’t want solutions. They’re all advocates for the status quo. It’s amazing to me how they never say anything about the 56% of the federal budget that’s unconstituionally going to wealth redistribution and entitlement programs. They don’t bat an eye when the little F-22 stealth fighter jet takes twice as long (it took 25 years just to design it) and costs twice as much to develop as the huge B-2 stealth bomber, but we need to do something about those earmarks!
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