A question about ear marks: What percentage of them are used

[hedgehog]

to send Federal money to Red states to fund programs that Blue States fund themselves with state taxes? This question was prompted by the Texas Congresswoman today who extolled a program using Federal money to fund a program by a (state?) college in Texas to provide tutoring to poor kids.

[Rosemary2205]

1. That may or may not be an earmark.

If the program in Texas is part of educational funding already in the federal budget then that would not covered under earmarks. The feds set aside money for the states for education and the state itself or the individual program can apply for federal funds under that general educational funding program.

An earmark specifies federal funding for a particular single local project. Such as Ted's bridge to nowhere and that indoor rainforest. Typically these are projects that could not pass the grant application process. What should have been done is the locals in Alaska should have applied for federal grant road building grant money and let that committee decide it on it's merits. Likewise with the rainforest.

[Recursion]

2. In theory earmarks don't increase spending

It's just a specification of how appropriated money is to be spent (and they aren't even binding on the executive agencies). In practice, they increase spending because people know that X million is already spoken for by pet projects, so they allocate X million more than the agency asked for.

The problem you mentioned goes far beyond earmarks though; most Federal programs are pretty much explicitly an attempt to redistribute tax money from wealthy (ie, blue) states to poor (ie, red) states. The irony being it's the red states that are against it and the blue states that are for it. A good chart of it is here