Today's new budget hides nearly 9,000 earmarks

And you thought it was hard to make sense of your own little checkbook with each month's statement.

The omnibus budget bill passed by the House today funds most of the federal government for this entire fiscal year, which actually began more than two months ago. The bill costs $516 billion, plus more money yet to be added for Iraq. It is more than 3,000 pages long, an unwieldy package that would normally be contained in 11 separate bills. (The Pentagon budget was passed separately.)

Now, the Roll Call newspaper reveals on its subscription-only website that this mammoth spending bill also includes nearly 9,000 earmarks, special provisions originated by individual legislators to benefit someone or something back home and buried inside a larger bill for a legislative ride relatively free of public scrutiny.

Earmarks for $136,000 here, $250,000 there, $1 million over there and a lot more sprinkled throughout. Just listing them took 700 spreadsheets. Taxpayers for Common Sense estimates that the 8,983 special earmarks will cost taxpayers more than $7.4 billion, though additional costs will become apparent in coming months.

Democrats boasted the earmark number was smaller than last year, but it still works out to 20 special spending provisions for each House member. Do you think these earmarks might get mentioned by incumbents campaigning for reelection next year?

"It’s totally fiscally irresponsible to lump everything together in one spending bill and put it to a vote less than 24 hours later,” said David Williams, vice president of policy for Citizens Against Government Waste. “It doesn’t have to be this way. They had all year to do this."

It must be the fault of that long vacation the Iraqi parliament took last summer that got similarly vacationing American legislators so hot and bothered.

Anyway, it's a darned good thing we had all that talk and all those promises by new Congressional leaders about earmark reform earlier this year. Otherwise, this earmark business could have become costly and stayed out of control.

-- Andrew Malcolm

Comments

[Joseph]

3000 pages, with 9,000 earmarks! First, it was 300 flooded school busses during Katrina. The devastation inflicted on the taxpayer's wallet has grown exponentially. Each page's amount alone probably exceeds the cost of the 300 wasted buses by many orders of magnitude.

The environmentalists should also be outraged.

How many forests were cut down to distribute copies?

Al Gore should be campaigning for Ron Paul and his smaller budgets in order to reduce the carbon footprint of Congress when all those copies are either incinerated or decay in a landfill releasing CO2.

Just imagine all the carbon that still would be trapped if the forests were left standing.

The time has definitely come for a Jeffersonian revolution to rein in our government.

[neotrebor]

Bums are bums
It does not matter if they belong to your family or mine. Our political bums take advantage of us irrespective of whether our names are democrat or republican.