Earmarked

One of the reasons that I think of myself as a liberal Republican, rather than a conservative Democrat (which I think of as two sides of the same coin) is because I favor fiscal solvency. Thats a religion that Democrats hadn't adhered to, much, though in the last two years, they've discovered that as a drawing point. (I'd like to think they discovered it because it was right, not because it was politically expedient.) A distinguishing mark of the fiscal proficacy that brought on the Democratic victory in the last election is the dramatically expanded use of 'earmarks', where money is specifically allocated to projects favored by a politician. The concept's probably not automatically bad, though I've never heard of an earmark that is aimed at, say, getting decent shoes on kids in the winter, and I've heard of lots aimed at, say, building bridges to nowhere and putting politicians names in prominent places.

I'm a Catholic, by the way. That's relevant to this.

So I was not surprised to read, in today's New York Times, that a politician had earmarked funds to go a specific function in Pennsylvania. But I was surprised, and more than a little irritated, to find that the specific function was rebuilding a state road that fed the campus of a Catholic college. As a result of an earmark by a senior Democratic representative, the college got four million dollars of federal money to fix up the road.

I don't like it. Money was steered to a specific recipient because that recipient had political pull -- not because it was justifiable (though it was), not because it was the best use of the money (and it probably wasn't), but because of who they knew -- in this case, they hired a professional lobbyist, who got them the money.

I wish I was on the mailing list of that college, just so I could refuse to give them money. Because what they did was wrong -- not illegal, not even terribly unethical, but wrong.