You’ve been hearing a lot about earmarks, and I bet you’ve decided they’re bad. After all, you probably trust Barack Obama, the world’s smartest man, and he says they are bad, so why shouldn’t you think so too. Media commentators never defend them. John McCain despises them and never takes advantage of them, which ought to be a red flag to any good Massachusetts voter, but maybe you just chalk this up to the same weird streak that made him choose Sarah Palin.
I’m here to tell you lots of earmarks are good. You benefit from them.
First let’s get an idea of the scope of earmarks. There are about 8,500 of them, according to U.S. Representative Michael Capuano, one of downtown Boston’s two congressmen. That’s divided among 435 members of congress and 100 senators. How the money gets distributed is a matter of the sponsor’s seniority, persuasive ability, and negotiation. That’s the way the world works in most matters, not just politics.
The money we’re talking about equals 1 percent of the federal budget, and it would get spent in some other way, with someone other than your elected official parceling it out. Think of the destruction Karl Rove might have caused with Massachusetts’s share of the pot if our senators and congress folk hadn’t been there to make the choices.
As much faith as I have in Obama’s judgment, I wonder why he spends any time at all on a “problem” that constitutes only 1 percent of the federal budget.
Earmarks may have gotten a bad rap from the tendency to equate earmarks with pork barrel spending.
It’s true they are both barnyard terms. The reference is obvious with pork barrel, but more obscure with the term earmark, which refers to a stamp of ownership, especially with regard to farm animals.
“Se that they [the sheep] be well-marked, both ear-marke pitch-marke and radelmarke,” wrote Anthonie Fitzherbert in “The Book of Husbandry,” in 1523, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. (You’d never have trusted the definition if I had plucked it off the Internet. Moreover, says the OED, a radelmarke is made by red ocher, but the book does not define pitch-marke, which must be made by resin.)
But I digress.
When most people think of earmarks, they remember former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens and the state’s only congressman Don Young and their unsuccessful proposal for a Bridge to Nowhere, backed at the time by Palin. Spending $320 million to connect Ketchikan to its airport, located on a nearby island, is extravagant federal fiscal grease for a barrel of fewer than 9,000 people. Even good programs can be abused.
But while pork barrel spending, which has the connotation of excess, is sometimes an earmark, earmarks are not necessarily pork. The OED goes on to say that since 1868, the term has meant setting aside money for a particular purpose, which senators and congressmen have long attempted in their districts. No pejorative there.
Earmarks are not necessarily wasteful, unfair or extravagant. Downtown Boston has benefitted from them just as Florida residents do when earmarks are directed at saving the Everglades.
Capuano is unapologetic about the practice. “If you pay taxes, shouldn’t you have some say about how they are spent and shouldn’t you get some share?” he asks.
He is also unapologetic that most of his earmarks are intended as seed money.
“I try to focus on things not otherwise being done that need priority,” he explains.
A good example of earmarks Capuano inserted in the 2005 and 2006 transportation bills were almost $7½ million for repairs to the Longfellow Bridge, which is undergoing the repairs now. That was not enough to do all the work, but it got the Department of Conservation and Recreation’s attention. “It wasn’t being looked at,” says Capuano. “Now it is.”
The Longfellow Bridge is also an example of why congress folk should have a say in local funding, according to Capuano.
Mayor Menino and Governor Patrick, other officials who influence how federal dollars are spent locally, might not notice the bridge’s condition, since Menino is usually not headed to Cambridge, and Patrick doesn’t cross the bridge on his commute to the State House. But Capuano’s district lies on both sides of the river. He is the one more likely to notice the bridge’s condition. Like governors and mayors, congress folk should have some say in how tax dollars are spent in their district.
Other earmarks that I bet all of us like that Capuano has sponsored are $4 million for the North Washington Street bridge, and funds for Massachusetts Avenue and Rutherford Avenue.
The Boston Groundwater Trust recently received $400,000. That’s the organization that helps protect all of your buildings that sit on filled land.
The Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology at MGH gets continual Capuano-sponsored earmarks. Such funding contributes to job stability, but also improves our chances of a good outcome if we have use the services at our local hospital.
The late Joe Moakley apparently got MGH an earmark for $2.5 million more than a decade ago to start Charles Street/MGH T station, although no one can remember for sure that it was an earmark.
Also benefiting from earmarks are local universities, the Franklin Park Zoo, Horizons for the Homeless, Children’s Hospital and I-Robot, which developed the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner as well as robots that search out unexploded bombs in Iraq, saving the lives of the American soldiers who would otherwise have to do the sleuthing.
Rep. Stephen Lynch, the other U. S. congressman in downtown Boston, has sponsored earmarks of $300,000 for the Juvenile Justice Center at Suffolk University, and various amounts for the Boston Year-Up program, which provides technological training for high school grads, Cushing House’s program for substance abusers in South Boston and the Dorchester-based Harbor Health, an elder service program.
So I want you to rethink your position on earmarks. Then send this column to a friend in Arizona. After learning how we benefit, Arizonians will start insisting that McCain take advantage of these sweet federal financial morsels too.