“Just to save everyone some time, here is the latest fight between the Paulistias and the anti-Paulistias on his earmark comments.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2204751/posts";
My post #101 in that thread:
The appropriation/earmark process is rather confusing. I googled this to see if I could also understand a little better. This is from Wikipedia (I don’t know how reliable Wiki is...):
“Earmarking differs from the broader appropriations process, defined in the Constitution, in which Congress grants a yearly lump sum of money to a Federal agency. These monies are allocated by the agency according to its legal authority and internal budgeting process. With an earmark, Congress has given itself the ability to direct a specified amount of money from an agency’s budget to be spent on a particular project, without the Members of the Congress having to identify themselves or the project.”
So, it sounds to me like the money has already been allocated to a budget in the appropriations process and earmarks direct how part of that budget is specifically spent. Voting “no” on the appropriation and then adding earmarks for your constituents does not seem to be a contradiction or hypocritical.
the money has already been allocated to a budget
The money is added to the budget, but is outside the needed operational expenses of the department. It is created from a baseline of the operational expenses plus the previous year's earmarks. Earmarks don't eat into the operational expenses, it is part of a culture in DC of adding more and more to the budget, over and above the needed operational expense to continue to cover these pet projects. Politicians cop out and say "Well, it is part of the budget anyway", hoping people don't realize that it is part of the budget because of earmarks the previous year, and the year before that, and the year before that, and so on, always nudging the baseline upward. The culture in DC actually penalizes saving money as it lowers the baseline and budgets are cut, so politicians always try to take as much pork as possible. Others like to point out, well it is only 1% or so (after the recent bailout and TARP packages, I would bet it is creeping closer to 10% if you count those..), but even at 1%, dropping that each year would reduce the baseline instead of increasing it. Dropping it 1% each year instead of growing it 1% each year could result in a 20% decrease in the budget over what it would have grown, in a decade.