The Political Bear

In an interesting twist, the three Presidential candidates all agreed on Thursday that the practice of earmarking is an inefficient way to spend tax payer money and therefore any earmarks should require a two thirds majority to be included in legislation.

“Six Democrats, including Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, and fewer than half of Senate Republicans backed McCain’s plan. Obama said earlier this week that he wouldn’t request any earmarks this year regardless of whether McCain’s amendment passed.”

While I am glad that Senator Obama has now decided that earmarks are bad, as of last year he felt very differently.

Obama Announces FY08 Federal Funding Requests

A few Fiscal Year 08 earmarks submitted by Senator Obama:

Women’s Sports Foundation, for its GoGirlGo! Chicago Initiative, $1,000,000;
Wetlands Initiative of Illinois, to support its Illinois River Nutrient Farm Pilot Project, $11,810,000;
West Frankfort, IL, to support replacement of its Big Ditch Pumping Station, $550,000; University of Illinois, for the Urban Teaching and Leadership Center, $1,000,000; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, to encourage further education in technical domains that can be cleared by the Defense Security Service, $2,000,000; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, College of Engineering, for Nanomedical Technologies, $3,000,000;
University of Illinois, College of Agriculture Consumer and Environmental Sciences, for the Soybean Disease Biotechnology Center , $2,000,000…. and on and on and on….etc.

For a grand total of, drum roll please, almost $400,000,000 dollars. Senator Obama is just a year late and $400 million short of being sincere on earmarks.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 8:49 am and is filed under analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.