RC CitizenView

Earmarks have been characterized as Pork barrel spending, even graft or corruption.

Be careful before you through out the baby with the bathwater. Rancho has recently received over $4,577,000.00 in so-called pork, one for the senior physical fitness program, and another to improve the I-15 interchange at foothill blvd.

Follow these links for the details:

Rancho Cucamonga I’15 Base Line Road Interchange; 1 recipient will receive $428,000. This is a first-time earmark.

I-15/Base Line Road Interchange Project, Rancho Cucamonga, California; 1 recipient will receive $4,000,000.

Senior Health, Nutrition and Transportation Program; 1 recipient will receive $149,000. This is a first-time earmark.

Why are these projects earmarked spending and not approved and authorized through the normal process of legislating?  Almost all legislators defend earmarks as necessary to target spending on worthy programs in their home districts.  They cite the faceless bureaucracies as untrustworthy to spend the public money in the most prudent manner.

The real story is that legislators are rewarded by their constitutions for taxpayer dollars they can bring to their home districts.  The more seniority and influence they have with their colleagues the greater the awarding of the earmark budget they control.

Its true that the budget contains the funding for there projects and that the congress as a whole must approve this spending.  Nevertheless, should we empower the majority of spending the agencies we have created for that purpose and then reserve a slush fund for the brokered process of earmarks?

We all benefit from this spending as seen from the earmarks cited here, so how should the process be changed?  Should we have a funding source that lends itself to cronyism, or reform the system into another yet unpredictable circumnavigation of the constitutions spending authority.

The bottom line is that most of the spending is only pork if its not in your back yard.

Legislators will not willing give up this chance to bring home the spending as long as we measure their success in terms of our local interests.  Is more visibility and transparency the answer?  The process survives only when your opposition cannot effectively draw attention to the spending.  Maybe John McCain has it right, the only solution is to scrap the entire system and hope for the best.

If McCain is elected it will worth watching how the legislators protect their access to funding of pet projects.