Earmark dispute splits GOP senators

[Scurrilous]

Debate over pet projects divides Old Bulls, newer Tea Party-backed lawmakers

<snip>

"Even as they prepare to welcome 13 newly elected Republicans into their ranks, GOP senators have already fired the opening salvos in an intraparty ideological battle over federal spending — one that threatens to divide the upper chamber’s Old Bulls and newer Tea Party-aligned members.

South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, a champion of conservative candidates like Florida’s Marco Rubio and Utah’s Mike Lee, announced Tuesday that he will push Senate Republicans to vote to make “earmarking” — the process by which lawmakers can set aside federal funds for pet projects in their home states — expressly against internal GOP rules.

Six of the new GOP freshmen, including five who received backing from DeMint during their campaigns, have signed on to his proposal.

But, while DeMint and other Senate fiscal conservatives argue that so-dubbed “pork barrel spending” wastes taxpayer dollars and facilitates fishy political back-scratching, other Republicans say that a ban would do little to curb government spending and would put more control into the hands of government agencies rather than lawmakers who best understand their constituents."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40128623/ns/politics-capitol_hill/

[randr]

1. We need to pass a law

that balances the amount of Federal Funds a State receives with how much they contribute. Take a whole lotta little red piggies off the people's tit.

[Bigmack]

2. Earmarks are less than 1% of the budget...

and total less than 2% of the debt. It's the wars and the tax cuts and the Medicare Scrip program that are the problem. Nobody fucking listens!

"These earmarks and "pork" projects are bankrupting America."  You hear that a lot.  Not true, though.  
This year Congress spent $16.5 billion on 9,129 projects around the country, according to Citizens Against Government Waste. Which is also less than one-half of 1 percent of all federal spending.
In fact, if you could retroactively undo every single pork-barrel project Congress has passed during the past 20 years — all 110,000 of them — you would have enough money to buy down the $13.7 trillion national debt by ... 2 percent.   
http://www.cagw.org/

The two wars, the Bush tax cuts and the Medicare prescription-drug program the Republicans pushed through in 2003.  The Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, and pushed the Medicare drug bill through by ending a filibuster by the Democrats. Just the drug program, which was never accounted for in the budget until 2009, is adding more to the deficit than the bank bailout, the stimulus and the new health-care law combined.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_Prescription_Drug,_Improvement,_and_Modernization_Act