Larsen’s name is on some $770 million in congressional earmarks for 2008, much of it shared with other members of the House with allied interests, including the Washington delegation. Included are monies for agricultural research, fighting the methamphetamine scourge, funding for local highway projects, support of transit needs and — an especially local favorite — funding for an ongoing federal flood protection study. Who is willing to say what part of that earmarked money we should, as a community, reject? Any volunteers?
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If all these earmarked items are each so vastly important, why aren’t our representatives and senators just putting them into the budget as it’s being built?  When they slip this stuff in during the dark of night, they’re just causing funds which were programmed for other projects to be diverted to theirs.  Never mind that these other projects were carefully planned, costed out, and determined necessary by the people actually responsible for running part of the government on a day-to-day basis.  Never mind that earmarks violate the processes which Congress itself has mandated everyone else use.  And in the end, Congress probably decides to fund the original budget items as well as its own pork by simply borrowing more money and adding it to the $9.4 trillion dollar national debt on which we pay around $500 billion each year in interest alone.

If this is what you want, just keep voting the same people right back into office again and again because they’re gonna just keep doing it until this country is bankrupt.

Take away earmarks and this country will be in a full blown recession. These projects provide jobs, incomes and put money back into the economy. While all of them may not seem like the best way to spend money, they still put money into local economies.

That’s nonsense.  This country is in recession because we have driven the value of our dollar into the dirt by our incessant spending of borrowed money, lack of any sort of effort to meet our own energy needs, and the loss of millions of our most meaningful jobs which have been replaced with menial ones.  You can’t measure the economic status of a country by looking only at corporate profits.  Why have a federal budget and laws governing it if our elected elites are just going to do whatever they want to please a few constituents?

I agree, Bush has run this country into the ground, we are so far in debt now, Clinton gave him a balanced budget, now we are in so far its crazy. All I am saying is taking earmarks away at this point would be more harm on the economy.

Well, we seem to agree on more things than we disagree on.  My whole point is really that there’s a finite amount of revenue to spend and we’ve got to have a system to decide what it needs to be spent on...and then stick to it.  Doing anything else just results in more debt and more problems.