Martin Hawver At The Rail

If you never considered the difference between state-level government and federal government, the current rancor over “earmarks” by members of Congress is a good place to start.

Earmarks that we’ve been hearing about from presidential candidates are essentially dedicating a portion of a federal agency’s budget appropriation to something specific. It could be a “bridge to nowhere” or it could be a water storage project or dam repair or nearly anything that members of Congress believe is important to their districts and their constituents.

In Kansas, state agency chiefs request that members of Congress from Kansas support earmarks that would divert money to important projects in their departments.

Gov. Kathleen Sebelius says she doesn’t track individual earmark requests made by her Cabinet secretaries. That doesn’t mean that cabinet-level secretaries don’t ask, for example, that senators try to scooch around money within federal agency budgets to assist in Kansas projects. But, Sebelius’ staff says, she isn’t making a list and checking it twice to see how those earmarks are doing in Congress.

Maybe that’s the break that we’re seeing between the federal government and state and local governments.

For local units of government and the state, whatever members of Congress can earmark for their district or state, well, that’s money that the state doesn’t have to come up with.

On a purely federal level, those earmarks amount to billions of dollars, some that would be spent anyway, some that is new money, but if you are a mayor or a governor and some project that needs doing gets funded with federal money, it’s tough to gripe too much about it.

Even Republican vice presidential nominee Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who lamented the quarter billion dollar “bridge to nowhere” project, canceled the project but her state kept the money that was appropriated for it. That’s money that Alaska will presumably put to some sound public use without bothering its taxpayers or using its own budget.

So while the earmarks furor is rising and politicians are beating their breasts opposing earmarks, it really comes down to definition. There are “their” earmarks, and there are “our” earmarks. Ours, of course, are better.

Is there silly stuff in those earmarks?  Sure.

Maybe that’s the test…silliness.

But, if, say, Kansas’ Department of Wildlife and Parks can get some federal help with…studying ways to improve Kansas reservoirs so that they are more useful in providing water to Kansas farms and towns, well, are you against that?

And even the silly earmarks probably make sense to someone. If your town got federal assistance in building a museum of…say, milo, and the museum brought in tourists who also bought lunch, some milo T-shirts to take home, maybe even stretched the visit into an overnight hotel stay, isn’t that a good thing for that town?

Earmarks, easy to love, easy to hate, not always simple to sort out.

You choose yours, I’ll choose mine…