earmarks – Jim Eltringham

With all the bailout buzz in the air, Mint.com – a free personal finance management website – has its own plan for an economic bailout package (pictured).

I counted five different times where the Mint plan taxes wealth – not income or consumption, but actual saved money (which has probably already been taxed as income). Mint proposes taxing investments and any money made off those investments and advocates seizing corporate bonuses and money that has already been paid out.

Once again: Mint purports to be a financial managment tool. But apparently they don’t believe in people saving money.

Even worse is Mint’s concept of a “Main Street Bailout” – which doesn’t send dollar one to Main Street at all. Their “renewable fuels” funding is nothing more than a subsidy for energy companies’ research and development labs. Their $50 billion mortgage rescue package will be administered by some government entity and doesn’t appear to include a plan for making those endangered mortages affordable to the borrowers who got in over their heads in the first place. And the $20 billion in state funding won’t go any farther than state capitals.

Mint clearly doesn’t care about creating a strong, smart, financial culture. But they do feel the need to advocate policies which sound like they help people solve problems – even if they make the problems worse.

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.

Tag: earmarks

Mint’s Failout

Daily Kos: Earmarks are OK!