Not all bad

Topeka Capital-Journal, The, Oct 23, 2008

Budget earmarks have taken a severe beating during this year's campaign season, but we suspect they will survive the pounding and be with us long after the votes are counted on Nov. 4.

Earmarks became an issue when Sen. John McCain railed against the practice and promised, if elected president, to veto every one that made it through Congress to his desk.

McCain considers the earmark system a waste of tax dollars and doesn't use it, but in that respect he is among the minority. Most of his congressional colleagues, who are adept at packaging legislation so it can avoid a veto or successfully override one, use the system and, when campaigning for re-election, tout their successes in bringing federal money back to the communities in their states.

We, too, think bringing some of our federal tax dollars back to Kansas is a good thing.

The earmark system undoubtedly has been abused at times -- to fund ridiculously expensive items that benefit few, better known as pork-barrel projects -- but we think it's worth saving.

One of the system's flaws is a lack of transparency, meaning there is no way to determine how some of those pork-barrel projects make their way through the budget and appropriation processes unless members of Congress are willing to acknowledge making the funding requests.

Representatives and senators seeking federal funding for projects back home now must submit their requests through a member of the House or Senate Appropriations Committee, respectively. When those committees later appropriate money for the federal government's different departments, agencies and programs, the committee members decide which requests for earmarks will be funded.

Earmarks approved by the committees then end up in the budget, without any trail to show where the funding request originated.

Adding such a trail would go a long way toward making the system more palatable.

We suggest that representatives and senators seeking earmarks be required to attach their names to the requests and be identified when the appropriations committees vote on them. Then, somewhere in the pages of the massive federal budget document, there should be room for the names of those who sought the funding, right alongside the line items for the projects.

Such transparency would eliminate some abuse of the system, while allowing it to continue serving communities and taxpayers across the country.

The legitimate projects that receive funding through earmarks likely are things that otherwise would have to be funded by local taxpayers, who already think they are being taxed too heavily by their state, county, city and school district, just to name a few of the government entities that raise money through taxes.

Whether it be a highway study or a wastewater treatment plant, every federal dollar allocated to a project is one less dollar local taxpayers will be asked to contribute.

Reversing the flow of some of those tax dollars we send to Washington, D.C., isn't a bad thing.