Daily Kos: Earmarks are OK!

The rhetorical gymnasts at DailyKos are hard at work "taking the steam out of John McCain's anti-earmark crusade." Their two-pronged approach has two key points:

1. Earmarks don't cost that much.
2. Earmarks pay for good things!

It's not pointing out earmarks that McCain has supported, or rooting out hypocrisy in McCain's position. They actually like earmarks (for the purposes of the 2008 Presidential campaign).

For the first point, DailyKos draws the analogy of a worker who makes $30,000 per year and carries $90,000 debt, approximately the ratio the country is in. Under this scale, the worker would spend $150 in earmarks - not enough to dent the debt. Thus, according to Kos, earmarks don't cost that much.

On the other hand, I'd advise the worker that throwing around money and spending wastefully is probably the type of behavior that led to the $90,000 in debt.

And of course DailyKos advises it's readers to highlight earmarks that do good things and were sponsored by Obama. Setting aside that it's probably a bad idea to highlight their candidate's record of supporting earmarks, is the point of reforming earmarks really about the outcome? If our government was spending money on the Monroe County Office of Puppy Punching, I doubt earmarks would be an issue.

Earmarks are bad because it's taxpayer money - yours and mine - going to a project so a Congressman or Senator can buy their constituents' votes. And regardless of DailyKos's moral relativism, that's wrong.