Good Luck
New member
First off, you seem to be confusing pork with earmarks. Frankly, earmarks are impossible to avoid. For instance, say congress writes a spending bill for maintaining the U.S. highway system. They are not going to simply say "let's spend $200 billion" and let the states, who actually do the contracting for highway maintenance, fight it out. They'll EARMARK so much for a specified project in PA, so much for rebuilding the Beartooth Pass in Montana and Wyoming, so much for upgrading/rebuilding highway bridges in TX, etc. Of course each senator is going to lobby for their state to receive funds needed for that state's projects. It's their JOB to represent their state interests in such matters. Earmarks simply distribute the funds approved by a spending bill among the states.
Frankly, those who called for, and/or promised an end to earmarks don't know what the heck they're talking about. Then again, it was the MSM that started talking about earmarks as if pork and earmarks were one and the same. Politicians had the choice of trying to explain the widespread mistake, or "going with the flow" and calling pork barrel spending by the wrong, but publicly accepted name.
Pork is a whole different matter from earmarks. Pork is when someone tacks on spending that has little or nothing to do with the bill itself, like creating a new national monument in Cheatsville, CA, and tacking that onto a military spending bill, or even tacking on funding for a $2 million dollar "scenic turnout" (which wasn't in the original plans) to the highway bill example above. (The latter is, perhaps, why some see a wide gray line between pork and earmarks.)
