Hold on to your wallet. Earmarks, the most corruptible and wasteful type of government spending, will be making a comeback if a handful of House Republicans have their way. These pigs in elephants’ clothing want to end a three-year moratorium on earmarks and start trading pork projects for votes in order to pass legislation.
Earmarks are expenditures slipped in spending bills that are not competitively awarded and serve only a local or special interest. Most earmarks are part of a disgraceful parade of vote buying in which a member of Congress sells his vote in exchange for money to fund a pork project in his district in the hopes that the project will buy the votes of his constituents.
Recent examples of earmarks include a $50-million handout to build an indoor rain forest in Iowa, $500,000 in tax money that went to a now-defunct teapot museum in North Carolina and a $100,000 giveaway to the Tiger Woods Foundation.
The most famous earmark of all, the Bridge to Nowhere, received such public scrutiny that the $398-million pork project in rural Alaska was scrapped altogether.
In 2010, facing public backlash for a rash of wasteful spending and outrageous stimulus projects, members of Congress agreed to a temporary moratorium on earmarks. The result has been heartening for taxpayers. Earmarks have decreased considerably in the past three years, from $16.5 billion in 2010 to $9.5 billion this year.