Hilzoy takes on McCain’s pet peeve:
And, as we all know, earmarks cost the government $16.9 billion and $18.3 billion every year. Unless you adopt the definition McCain uses, in which case they cost all of $52.1 billion. This still leaves a cool $250-350 billion to be found elsewhere. Moreover, earmarks, so defined, turn out to include things like all our aid to Israel and Egypt, $6 billion in new military housing, "critical government construction efforts such as a new Federal Bureau of Investigation building in Los Angeles and 12 facilities aimed at assisting U.S. border patrol and customs officials in fully screening all cargo and individuals entering the country", "drug eradication funds for Colombia" (well, I’d go along with that one, but then I’m in favor of legalizing marijuana and adopting a demand-based approach to other illegal drugs), "two thirds of all foreign assistance", and lots of other fun stuff.
Personally, I think that there are two real problems with earmarks.
The first has been largely fixed: that they need to be fully transparent. The second is that a lot of genuinely useful projects are funded via earmarks, and earmarks are generally a pretty lousy funding mechanism. There is no earthly reason why infrastructure projects shouldn’t be funded according to actual need, instead of being largely funded through earmarks. But this is not an argument for defunding those projects; it’s an argument for funding them via a different mechanism. Even using McCain’s definition, cutting earmarks don’t come close to funding his tax cuts; once we subtract out the genuinely useful programs that have the misfortune to be funded by this silly mechanism, the idea of paying for his tax cuts by cutting earmarks is risible.
The Dish 